Improved traffic sign recognition algorithm based on YOLOv4-tiny

Abstract

This study offers an enhanced yolov4-tiny traffic sign identification method for easy deployment on mobile or embedded devices to address the difficulties of a high number of parameters, low recognition accuracy, and poor real-time performance of traffic sign recognition models in complex scenarios. The yolov4-tiny network serves as the model’s foundation. To begin, Octave Convolution is incorporated into the backbone network to eliminate low-frequency feature redundancy, lowering the number of parameters in the model and enhancing computational efficiency. Second, the convolutional block attention module is employed to improve the recognition accuracy of small and medium-sized targets by strengthening the weights of traffic sign regions and suppressing the weights of invalid features. Finally, in the feature fusion stage, the Feature Pyramid Networks structure is replaced with the Simplified Path Aggregation Network structure to improve the fusing of shallow feature information with deep semantic knowledge and lower the miss detection rate even more On the TT100K data set as well as on CCTSDB dataset, the experimental results suggest that our technique can achieve good recognition performance. With a 16MB model size, our solution improves the mean average precision by 3.5 percent and the Frame Per Second by 12.5 f/s when compared to the yolov4-tiny algorithm. Our method outperforms yolov4-tiny in terms of recognition accuracy and detection speed, and it can easily meet the real-time requirements for traffic sign recognition.