From Sound to Sense: An Anatomy of Semantic Supervision for Speech-Driven Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Imagery

Speech-driven visual grounding in remote sensing (RSVG) removes the typing bottleneck of text-based interaction and is intended to preserve prosodic intent, enabling hands-free target acquisition in time-critical missions. The direct-audio paradigm, mapping raw speech straight to a bounding box and bypassing automatic speech recognition (ASR), was recently adopted by RSTalker, but what such grounders actually learn about language remains unmeasured. SemEcho grafts a frozen Whisper speech pathway onto a VLTVG grounding host so that speech and text share one decoder, making the paired text, free by construction since speech corpora in this task are synthesized from DIOR-RSVG expressions, a training-time teacher and a fair, same-host text upper bound. On this instrument we dissect three semantic injection channels (feature-mimicry distillation, word-level CTC supervision, and two-stage ASR pretraining) with linear semantic probes, and release Audio-DIOR-R (80,973 training clips; 10 timbres x K=3; Qwen3-TTS synthesis with online sox noise lambda in [0, 0.4]) and Audio-DIOR-Comp, a re-split holding out 17 attribute-category combinations under a 2x2 acoustic-semantic protocol. Our anatomy yields four findings. (i) Whether direct alignment beats a domain-trained ASR cascade is decided by recognizer quality: against a weak in-domain cascade (CTC 0.53) direct wins by 9.0 [email protected] points with transcription errors concentrated on spatial-relation words, but a strong in-domain cascade (CTC 0.029) reaches the text upper bound (80.8 vs. 81.0) and beats even the strongest direct model by 8.8 points; the anti-ASR premise holds only against weak recognizers.