Description generation for remote sensing images using attribute attention mechanism

Image captioning generates a semantic description of an image. It deals with image understanding and text mining, which has made great progress in recent years. However, it is still a great challenge to bridge the “semantic gap” between low-level features and high-level semantics in remote sensing images, in spite of the improvement of image resolutions. In this paper, we present a new model with an attribute attention mechanism for the description generation of remote sensing images. Therefore, we have explored the impact of the attributes extracted from remote sensing images on the attention mechanism. The results of our experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed model. The proposed method obtains six higher scores and one slightly lower, compared against several state of the art techniques, on the Sydney Dataset and Remote Sensing Image Caption Dataset (RSICD), and receives all seven higher scores on the UCM Dataset for remote sensing image captioning, indicating that the proposed framework achieves robust performance for semantic description in high-resolution remote sensing images.