Indian traffic sign detection and recognition using deep learning

Abstract

Traffic signs play a crucial role in managing traffic on the road, disciplining the drivers, thereby preventing injury, property damage, and fatalities. Traffic sign management with automatic detection and recognition is very much part of any Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this era of self-driving vehicles, calls for automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs cannot be overstated. This paper presents a deep-learning-based autonomous scheme for cognizance of traffic signs in India. The automatic traffic sign detection and recognition was conceived on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)- Refined Mask R-CNN (RM R-CNN)-based end-to-end learning. The proffered concept was appraised via an innovative dataset comprised of 6480 images that constituted 7056 instances of Indian traffic signs grouped into 87 categories. We present several refinements to the Mask R-CNN model both in architecture and data augmentation. We have considered highly challenging Indian traffic sign categories which are not yet reported in previous works. The dataset for training and testing of the proposed model is obtained by capturing images in real-time on Indian roads. The evaluation results indicate lower than 3% error. Furthermore, RM R-CNN’s performance was compared with the conventional deep neural network architectures such as Fast R-CNN and Mask R-CNN. Our proposed model achieved precision of 97.08% which is higher than precision obtained by Mask R-CNN and Faster R-CNN models.