PSG-Yolov5: A Paradigm for Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition Algorithm Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

With the gradual popularization of autonomous driving technology, how to obtain traffic sign information efficiently and accurately is very important for subsequent decision-making and planning tasks. Traffic sign detection and recognition (TSDR) algorithms include color-based, shape-based, and machine learning based. However, the algorithms mentioned above are insufficient for traffic sign detection tasks in complex environments. In this paper, we propose a traffic sign detection and recognition paradigm based on deep learning algorithms. First, to solve the problem of insufficient spatial information in high-level features of small traffic signs, the parallel deformable convolution module (PDCM) is proposed in this paper. PDCM adaptively acquires the corresponding receptive field preserving the integrity of the abstract information through symmetrical branches thereby improving the feature extraction capability. Simultaneously, we propose sub-pixel convolution attention module (SCAM) based on the attention mechanism to alleviate the influence of scale distribution. Distinguishing itself from other feature fusion, our proposed method can better focus on the information of scale distribution through the attention module. Eventually, we introduce GSConv to further reduce the computational complexity of our proposed algorithm, better satisfying industrial application. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods can effectively improve performance, both in detection accuracy and mAP@0.5. Specifically, when the proposed PDCM, SCAM, and GSConv are applied to the Yolov5, it achieves 89.2% mAP@0.5 in TT100K, which exceeds the benchmark network by 4.9%.