Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning
Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims to automatically generate sentences describing the difference in content in remote sensing bitemporal images. Recent works extract the changes between bitemporal features and employ a hierarchical approach to fuse multiple changes of interest, yiel...
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MDPI AG
2023-12-01
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Series: | Remote Sensing |
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Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/23/5611 |
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author | Chen Cai Yi Wang Kim-Hui Yap |
author_facet | Chen Cai Yi Wang Kim-Hui Yap |
author_sort | Chen Cai |
collection | DOAJ |
description | Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims to automatically generate sentences describing the difference in content in remote sensing bitemporal images. Recent works extract the changes between bitemporal features and employ a hierarchical approach to fuse multiple changes of interest, yielding change captions. However, these methods directly aggregate all features, potentially incorporating non-change-focused information from each encoder layer into the change caption decoder, adversely affecting the performance of change captioning. To address this problem, we proposed an Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network (ICT-Net). ICT-Net is able to extract and incorporate the most critical changes of interest in each encoder layer to improve change description generation. It initially extracts bitemporal visual features from the CNN backbone and employs an Interactive Change-Aware Encoder (ICE) to capture the crucial difference between these features. Specifically, the ICE captures the most change-aware discriminative information between the paired bitemporal features interactively through difference and content attention encoding. A Multi-Layer Adaptive Fusion (MAF) module is proposed to adaptively aggregate the relevant change-aware features in the ICE layers while minimizing the impact of irrelevant visual features. Moreover, we extend the ICE to extract multi-scale changes and introduce a novel Cross Gated-Attention (CGA) module into the change caption decoder to select essential discriminative multi-scale features to improve the change captioning performance. We evaluate our method on two RSICC datasets (e.g., LEVIR-CC and LEVIRCCD), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a state-of-the-art performance. |
first_indexed | 2024-03-09T01:42:45Z |
format | Article |
id | doaj.art-186d58f3e1d4498db28d4518ba0d45e2 |
institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
issn | 2072-4292 |
language | English |
last_indexed | 2024-03-09T01:42:45Z |
publishDate | 2023-12-01 |
publisher | MDPI AG |
record_format | Article |
series | Remote Sensing |
spelling | doaj.art-186d58f3e1d4498db28d4518ba0d45e22023-12-08T15:25:14ZengMDPI AGRemote Sensing2072-42922023-12-011523561110.3390/rs15235611Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change CaptioningChen Cai0Yi Wang1Kim-Hui Yap2School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, SingaporeDepartment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong KongSchool of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, SingaporeRemote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims to automatically generate sentences describing the difference in content in remote sensing bitemporal images. Recent works extract the changes between bitemporal features and employ a hierarchical approach to fuse multiple changes of interest, yielding change captions. However, these methods directly aggregate all features, potentially incorporating non-change-focused information from each encoder layer into the change caption decoder, adversely affecting the performance of change captioning. To address this problem, we proposed an Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network (ICT-Net). ICT-Net is able to extract and incorporate the most critical changes of interest in each encoder layer to improve change description generation. It initially extracts bitemporal visual features from the CNN backbone and employs an Interactive Change-Aware Encoder (ICE) to capture the crucial difference between these features. Specifically, the ICE captures the most change-aware discriminative information between the paired bitemporal features interactively through difference and content attention encoding. A Multi-Layer Adaptive Fusion (MAF) module is proposed to adaptively aggregate the relevant change-aware features in the ICE layers while minimizing the impact of irrelevant visual features. Moreover, we extend the ICE to extract multi-scale changes and introduce a novel Cross Gated-Attention (CGA) module into the change caption decoder to select essential discriminative multi-scale features to improve the change captioning performance. We evaluate our method on two RSICC datasets (e.g., LEVIR-CC and LEVIRCCD), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a state-of-the-art performance.https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/23/5611image change captioningremote sensingmulti-layer change awarenesstransformer |
spellingShingle | Chen Cai Yi Wang Kim-Hui Yap Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning Remote Sensing image change captioning remote sensing multi-layer change awareness transformer |
title | Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning |
title_full | Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning |
title_fullStr | Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning |
title_full_unstemmed | Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning |
title_short | Interactive Change-Aware Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning |
title_sort | interactive change aware transformer network for remote sensing image change captioning |
topic | image change captioning remote sensing multi-layer change awareness transformer |
url | https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/23/5611 |
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