Visual Question Answering using Deep Learning: A Survey and Performance Analysis

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task combines challenges for processing data with both Visual and Linguistic processing, to answer basic `common sense' questions about given images. Given an image and a question in natural language, the VQA system tries to find the correct answer to it using visual elements of the image and inference gathered from textual questions. In this survey, we cover and discuss the recent datasets released in the VQA domain dealing with various types of question-formats and enabling robustness of the machine-learning models. Next, we discuss about new deep learning models that have shown promising results over the VQA datasets. At the end, we present and discuss some of the results computed by us over the vanilla VQA models, Stacked Attention Network and the VQA Challenge 2017 winner model. We also provide the detailed analysis along with the challenges and future research directions.