Enhancing Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching for Visual Misinformation Detection Using Semantic Segmentation

The recent advancements in generative AI techniques, which have significantly increased the online dissemination of altered images and videos, have raised serious concerns about the credibility of digital media available on the Internet and distributed through information channels and social networks. This issue particularly affects domains that rely heavily on trustworthy data, such as journalism, forensic analysis, and Earth observation. To address these concerns, the ability to geolocate a non-geo-tagged ground-view image without external information, such as GPS coordinates, has become increasingly critical. This study tackles the challenge of linking a ground-view image, potentially exhibiting varying fields of view (FoV), to its corresponding satellite image without the aid of GPS data. To achieve this, we propose a novel four-stream Siamese-like architecture, the Quadruple Semantic Align Net (SAN-QUAD), which extends previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches by leveraging semantic segmentation applied to both ground and satellite imagery. Experimental results on a subset of the CVUSA dataset demonstrate significant improvements of up to 9.8\% over prior methods across various FoV settings.

A Semantic Segmentation-guided Approach for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching

Nowadays the accurate geo-localization of ground-view images has an important role across domains as diverse as journalism, forensics analysis, transports, and Earth Observation. This work addresses the problem of matching a query ground-view image with the corresponding satellite image without GPS data. This is done by comparing the features from a ground-view image and a satellite one, innovatively leveraging the corresponding latter's segmentation mask through a three-stream Siamese-like network. The proposed method, Semantic Align Net (SAN), focuses on limited Field-of-View (FoV) and ground panorama images (images with a FoV of 360{\deg}). The novelty lies in the fusion of satellite images in combination with their semantic segmentation masks, aimed at ensuring that the model can extract useful features and focus on the significant parts of the images. This work shows how SAN through semantic analysis of images improves the performance on the unlabelled CVUSA dataset for all the tested FoVs.

Learning from Unlabelled Data with Transformers: Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of High Resolution Aerial Images

Data from satellites or aerial vehicles are most of the times unlabelled. Annotating such data accurately is difficult, requires expertise, and is costly in terms of time. Even if Earth Observation (EO) data were correctly labelled, labels might change over time. Learning from unlabelled data within a semi-supervised learning framework for segmentation of aerial images is challenging. In this paper, we develop a new model for semantic segmentation of unlabelled images, the Non-annotated Earth Observation Semantic Segmentation (NEOS) model. NEOS performs domain adaptation as the target domain does not have ground truth semantic segmentation masks. The distribution inconsistencies between the target and source domains are due to differences in acquisition scenes, environment conditions, sensors, and times. Our model aligns the learned representations of the different domains to make them coincide. The evaluation results show that NEOS is successful and outperforms other models for semantic segmentation of unlabelled data.