Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental task in remote sensing and has
recently received increased interest. While the visual information from
overhead images with powerful models and efficient algorithms yields
considerable performance on scene recognition, it still suffers from the
variation of ground objects, lighting conditions etc. Inspired by the
multi-channel perception theory in cognition science, in this paper, for
improving the performance on the aerial scene recognition, we explore a novel
audiovisual aerial scene recognition task using both images and sounds as
input. Based on an observation that some specific sound events are more likely
to be heard at a given geographic location, we propose to exploit the knowledge
from the sound events to improve the performance on the aerial scene
recognition. For this purpose, we have constructed a new dataset named AuDio
Visual Aerial sceNe reCognition datasEt (ADVANCE). With the help of this
dataset, we evaluate three proposed approaches for transferring the sound event
knowledge to the aerial scene recognition task in a multimodal learning
framework, and show the benefit of exploiting the audio information for the
aerial scene recognition. The source code is publicly available for
reproducibility purposes.Comment: ECCV 202