Title
Change Detection Meets Visual Question Answering
Abstract
The Earth's surface is continually changing, and identifying changes plays an important role in urban planning and sustainability. Although change detection techniques have been successfully developed for many years, these techniques are still limited to experts and facilitators in related fields. In order to provide every user with flexible access to change information and help them better understand land-cover changes, we introduce a novel task: change detection-based visual question answering (CDVQA) on multitemporal aerial images. In particular, multitemporal images can be queried to obtain high-level change-based information according to content changes between two input images. We first build a CDVQA dataset, including multitemporal image-question-answer triplets using an automatic question-answer generation method. Then, a baseline CDVQA framework is devised in this work, and it contains four parts: multitemporal feature encoding, multitemporal fusion, multimodal fusion, and answer prediction. In addition, we also introduce a change enhancing module to multitemporal feature encoding, aiming at incorporating more change-related information. Finally, the effects of different backbones and multitemporal fusion strategies are studied on the performance of CDVQA task. The experimental results provide useful insights for developing better CDVQA models, which are important for future research on this task. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/YZHJessica/CDVQA.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TGRS.2022.3203314
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Task analysis, Semantics, Visualization, Remote sensing, Earth, Feature extraction, Question answering (information retrieval), Change detection, deep learning, multitemporal aerial images, visual question answering (VQA)
Journal
60
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0196-2892
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhenghang Yuan100.34
Lichao Mou225425.35
Zhitong Xiong300.34
Xiao Xiang Zhu4896103.00