Remote Sensing Image Retrieval remains a challenging topic due to the special nature of Remote Sensing imagery. Such images contain various different semantic objects, which clearly complicates the retrieval task. In this paper, we present an image retrieval pipeline that uses attentive, local convolutional features and aggregates them using the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) to produce a global descriptor. We study various system parameters such as the multiplicative and additive attention mechanisms and descriptor dimensionality. We propose a query expansion method that requires no external inputs. Experiments demonstrate that even without training, the local convolutional features and global representation outperform other systems. After system tuning, we can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results. Furthermore, we observe that our query expansion method increases overall system performance by about 3%, using only the top-three retrieved images. Finally, we show how dimensionality reduction produces compact descriptors with increased retrieval performance and fast retrieval computation times, e.g. 50% faster than the current systems.

The current paradigm in privacy protection in streetview images is to detect and blur sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a framework that is an alternative to blurring, which automatically removes and inpaints moving objects (e.g. pedestrians, vehicles) in street-view imagery. We propose a novel moving object segmentation algorithm exploiting consistencies in depth across multiple street-view images that are later combined with the results of a segmentation network. The detected moving objects are removed and inpainted with information from other views, to obtain a realistic output image such that the moving object is not visible anymore. We evaluate our results on a dataset of 1000 images to obtain a peak noise-to-signal ratio (PSNR) and L 1 loss of 27.2 dB and 2.5%, respectively. To assess overall quality, we also report the results of a survey conducted on 35 professionals, asked to visually inspect the images whether object removal and inpainting had taken place. The inpainting dataset will be made publicly available for scientific benchmarking purposes at

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Retrieving specific vehicle tracks by Natural Language (NL)-based descriptions is a convenient way to monitor vehicle movement patterns and traffic-related events. NLbased image retrieval has several applications in smart cities, traffic control, etc. In this work, we propose TIED, a text-to-image encoder-decoder model for the simultaneous extraction of visual and textual information for vehicle track retrieval. The model consists of an encoder network that enforces the two modalities into a common latent space and a decoder network that performs an inverse mapping to the text descriptions. The method exploits visual semantic attributes of a target vehicle along with a cycle-consistency loss. The proposed method employs both intra-modal and inter-modal relationships to improve retrieval performance.Our system yields competitive performance achieving the 7th position in the Natural Language-Based Vehicle Retrieval public track of the 2021 NVIDIA AI City Challenge. We demonstrate that the proposed TIED model obtains six times higher Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) than the baseline, achieving an MRR of 15.48. The code and models will be made publicly available.

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Recently, privacy has a growing importance in several domains, especially in street-view images. The conventional way to achieve this is to automatically detect and blur sensitive information from these images. However, the processing cost of blurring increases with the ever growing resolution of images. We propose a system that is cost-effective even after increasing the resolution by a factor of 2.5. The new system utilizes depth data obtained from LiDAR to significantly reduce the search space for detection, thereby reducing the processing cost. Besides this, we test several detectors after reducing the detection space and provide an alternative solution based on state-of-the-art deep learning detectors to the existing HoG-SVM-Deep system that is faster and has a higher performance.