Deep Learning-based Traffic Sign Recognition for Autonomous Driverless Vehicles

Abstract

Traffic sign detection and recognition play a crucial part in driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicle technology. One of the major prerequisites of safe and widespread implementation of this technology is a TSDR algorithm that is not only accurate but also robust and reliable in a variety of real-world scenarios. However, in addition to the large variation among the traffic signs to detect, the traffic images that are captured in the wild are not ideal and often obscured by different adverse weather conditions and motion artifacts that substantially increase the difficulty level of this task. Robust traffic sign detection and recognition (TSDR) is of paramount importance for the successful realization of autonomous vehicle technology. The importance of this task has led to a vast amount of research efforts and many promising methods have been proposed in the existing literature. However, the machine learning methods have been evaluated on clean and challenge-free datasets and overlooked the performance deterioration associated with different challenging conditions (CCs) that obscure the traffic images captured in the wild. In this paper, we look at the TSDR problem under CCs and focus on the performance degradation associated with them. To overcome this, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based TSDR framework with prior enhancement.