EDGE DETECTION TECHNIQUE BASED ON BILATERAL FILTERING AND ITERATIVE THRESHOLD SELECTION ALGORITHM AND TRANSFER LEARNING FOR TRAFFIC SIGN RECOGNITION

Abstract

The traffic sign identification and recognition system (TSIRS) is an essential component for autonomous vehicles to succeed. The TSIRS helps to collect and provide helpful information for autonomous driving systems. The information may include limits on speed, directions for driving, signs to stop or lower the speed, and many more essential things for safe driving. Recently, incidents have been reported regarding autonomous vehicle crashes due to traffic sign identification and recognition system failures. The TSIRS fails to recognize the traffic signs in challenging conditions such as skewed signboards, scratches on traffic symbols, discontinuous or damaged traffic symbols, etc. These challenging conditions are presented for various reasons, such as accidents, storms, artificial damage, etc. Such traffic signs contain an ample amount of noise, because of which traffic sign identification and recognition become a challenging task for automated TSIRS systems. The proposed method in this paper addresses these challenges. The sign edge is a helpful feature for the recognition of traffic signs. A novel traffic sign edge detection algorithm is introduced based on bilateral filtering with adaptive thresholding and varying aperture size that effectively detects the edges from such noisy images. The proposed edge detection algorithm and transfer learning is used to train the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and recognize the traffic signs. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared with existing edge detection methods. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves optimal Mean Square Error (MSE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) error rates and has a better Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) ratio than the traditional edge detection algorithms. Furthermore, the precision rate, recall rate, and F1 scores are evaluated for the CNN models. With the German Traffic Sign Benchmark database (GTSRB), the proposed algorithm and Inception V3 CNN model gives promising results when it receives the edge-detected images for training and testing.