Can linguistic features extracted from geo-referenced tweets help building function classification in remote sensing?

The fusion of two or more different data sources is a widely accepted technique in remote sensing while becoming increasingly important due to the availability of big Earth Observation satellite data. As a complementary source of geo-information to satellite data, massive text messages from social media form a temporally quasi-seamless, spatially multi-perspective stream, but with unknown and diverse quality. Despite the uncontrolled quality: can linguistic features extracted from geo-referenced tweets support remote sensing tasks? This work presents a straightforward decision fusion framework for very high-resolution remote sensing images and Twitter text messages. We apply our proposed fusion framework to a land-use classification task – the building function classification task – in which we classify building functions like commercial or residential based on linguistic features derived from tweets and remote sensing images. Using building tags from OpenStreetMap (OSM), we labeled tweets and very high-resolution (VHR) images from Google Maps. We collected English tweets from San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. and trained a stacked bi-directional LSTM neural network with these tweets. For the aerial images, we predicted building functions with state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures fine-tuned from ImageNet on the given task. After predicting each modality separately, we combined the prediction probabilities of both models building-wise at a decision level. We show that the proposed fusion framework can improve the classification results of the building type classification task. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use semantic contents of Twitter messages and fusing them with remote sensing images to classify building functions at a single building level.