Signage Research Articles

Semiotic Modes in Local Gastronomic Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Culinary Shop Signs in Greece and Cyprus

Semiotic Modes in Local Gastronomic Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Culinary Shop Signs in Greece and Cyprus

Traffic Sign Board Detection Using Single Shot Detection (SSD)

Abstract: Traffic sign board detection (TSBD) is a significant portion of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Being able to identify traffic signals more accurately and effectively can improve safe driving .Due to increase in technology there are autonomous vehicles . The traffic sign recognition process includes two parts: detection and classification. In this paper, we use an object detection algorithm called SSD to detect the traffic signs. This convolutional neural network uses multiple feature maps to detect objects. For the traffic sign is very small to the whole picture, the SSD model has been improved to have a better detection result of traffic signs. In the experiments, the model has been simplified and the size of the prior box has been modified. The improved network has a good detection effect on small targets. The results on the test data set show that the proposed algorithm performs well for single-target, multi-target and dark-light images. The precision and recall on the test data set are 91.09%, and 88.06%. Keywords: Automatic traffic sign board Detection, SSD, Image processing, Text alert.

Identity construction on shop signs in Singapore’s Chinatown: a study of linguistic choices by Chinese Singaporeans and New Chinese immigrants

ABSTRACT Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL practices of new Chinese immigrants in Chinatowns, who are often associated with transnationalism and the rise of China. Focusing on Singapore’s Chinatown, the present study attempts to explore Chinese Singaporean and new Chinese immigrants’ linguistic choices concerning the Chinese-language signs displayed in the LL. Drawing on 326 instances of signs collected during site visits, the study found that Chinese Singaporeans and new Chinese immigrants make different linguistic choices when projecting their respective authenticities and identities. These findings suggest that there is indeed a linguistic basis for previously expressed arguments that Chinese Singaporean authenticity is threatened by new Chinese immigrants, shedding light on the need to examine the heterogeneity of Chinatown from the perspective of LL. This study enriches the scholarly understanding of LL practices within Chinese diasporic settlements in the East.

Traffic Sign Detection

Road signs are important to ensure smooth traffic flow without bottlenecks or mishaps. Road symbols are the pictorial representations having different necessary information required to be understood by driver. Road signs in front of the vehicle are ignored by the drivers and this can lead to catastrophic accidents. This paper presents an overview of the traffic sign board detection and recognition and implements a procedure to extract the road sign from a natural complex image, processes it and alerts the driver using voice command It is implemented in such a way that it acts as a boon to drivers to make easy decisions. There are several major challenges that affects the detection and recognition process of traffic signs and makes it difficult for the driver to identify the signs in adverse weather conditions and darkness, these challenges and problems are highlighted in this study. Traffic signs are detected based on various features such as color, shape, and texture etc. Based on these features numerous methods exists for detection of traffic signs. We have describe a new, real-time traffic sign detection. This challenge get more difficult to meet in a city like environment where multiple traffic signs, ads, parking vehicles, pedestrians, and other moving or background objects make the recognition much more difficult.

Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition Using CNN

Advanced Driver Assistant system (ADAS) Plays the tremendous role in protecting human lives by improving the road safety. Traffic sign boards are placed beside the roads to alert the driver about the upcoming road scenario and the rules to be followed. Artificial Intelligence help us to recognise the sign boards and assist the drivers by updating it. Convolution neural network help us to classify the sign boards with high accuracy. By increasing the number of layers, we can improve the accuracy of our prediction. Here we are using 500 hidden layers. GTSRB dataset is used for training and testing purpose, by fine tuning the parameters, we classify the 43 classes of traffic signs with notable accuracy.

Amid signs of change: language policy, ideology and power in the linguistic landscape of urban Rwanda

In this paper we explore the nexus of language policy, ideology and power in the linguistic landscape of urban Rwanda. In post-genocide Rwanda, English has been promoted and gained status. This has led to an increased usage of English on shop signs in the streets of Kigali and other towns in Rwanda at the expense of both French and Kinyarwanda. Unique quantitative language data documented in streets before 2008 are in this study compared to data collected in 2018, in the same streets. This forms the background for analysis of official discourse, targeting language policy changes, especially after the 2008 decision to appoint English as the language of administration as well as the medium of instruction throughout the educational system from grade 1 on. This decision was made despite the fact that Rwanda has a national language, Kinyarwanda, known by 99.4 per cent of the population. The analysis shows that political aspects of language policy decisions are downplayed. Officially, both discursively and in practice, the Rwandan government, that is the English speaking elite in power, legitimize their decisions by pretending that imposing English is an inevitable, pragmatic and rational measure for economic development. This narrative reveals ideas about inherent qualities of specific languages while simultaneously discarding others. Additionally, in public discourse all four official languages are equal. Reality is different. In a society where the status language is only acquired through education and used as medium of instruction, power differences and socioeconomic inequalities are neglected and obscured.

Linguistic landscape in transnational areas: a comparative study of African and Korean neighbourhoods in Guangzhou

ABSTRACT Not only does language practice in shop signs generate a sense of place with particular meanings to visitors, it also indicates the kind of economic activity performed in that place. By investigating and comparing the shop name signs in the two largest foreign migrant neighbourhoods in Guangzhou, specifically, Baohan Straight Street (African community) and Yuanjing Road (Korean community), this study aims to reveal the distinctive economic patterns reflected by the two different linguistic landscapes and to shed new light on the relationship between linguistic landscape and economy. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to interpret the messages the shop name signs convey, including an examination of language choices and combinations as well as other visual resources used in the signs. The findings suggest that the foreign languages, namely, English and Korean, perform contrasting functions, with the former providing more practical information while the latter being more of an index of ‘Korean authenticity’. The disparate linguistic landscapes in these two contexts emerge as an outcome of two specific economic patterns, namely, ‘low-end globalisation’ and ‘symbolic economy’.

Linguistic Landscape in Tanjungbalai

This study investigated the texts used in public spaces in Tanjungbalai, North Sumatera, Indonesia. From 182 signboards analyzed, it was found that the items in the bottom-up category had a large number than in the top-down category. This finding approved that shop notes, private business notes, and private broadcasts dominated the Tanjungbalai’s linguistic landscape. The texts used in top-down and bottom-up categories were monolingual (using BI/FL/LL) and bilingual (using BI and FL/ BI and LL/ FL and LL). In terms of monolingualism, BI was dominantly used in both categories. In the top-down category, BI was used in 19 nameplates of public institutions, 7 public notes of common interest, and 11 public broadcasts. In the bottom-up category, BI was used in 46 shop notes, 11 private business notes, and 16 private broadcasts. However, LL had the least number in use. It was merely used in 1 public broadcast and 2 shop notes. In terms of bilingualism, in the top-down category, bilingualism was only found in public broadcasts while in the bottom-up category, it was found in all types of items. Public broadcasts in Tanjungbalai combined BI with LL. Such combination will allow a culturally diverse society to comprehend the information provided by state and local government. In the bottom-up category, BI and FL were the major combinations identified (found in 15 shop signs, 2 private business signs, and 14 private announcements), followed by FL and LL combination (found in 3 shop signs), and BI and LL combination (found in 1 shop sign). Low LL usage in all categories (top-down, bottom-up, monolingual, and bilingual) indicated the failure of local government to promote LL and the potential for the death of LL. This study, then, can be a self-reflection for the local government in Tanjungbalai to redesign language policy and planning.

Character-Level Street View Text Spotting Based on Deep Multisegmentation Network for Smarter Autonomous Driving

Urban scenes are full of street entities with sign boards. Therefore, in autonomous driving, street view text spotting techniques will play a significant role in the precise understanding of surrounding scenes during driving, because texts contained in the images usually provide important clues for accurate image understanding, while it is often ambiguous for existing computer vision algorithms to understand scene images without texts. In this work, we propose a <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</b> ulti- <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S</b> egmentation network for character-level scene <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</b> ext <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">D</b> etection (MSTD). The MSTD introduces a densely connected atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to enlarge the receptive field of the feature extraction layer, so as to localize long as well as large-sized text instances. Moreover, it devises a double segmentation subnetwork to utilize two independent but inherently complementary losses to co-optimize the network and increase the reliability of the confidence scores in predicting the text/nontext areas. With the character instances detected by the MSTD, one can easily perform scene text spotting with classic object recognition networks such as ResNet and DenseNet. We carried out extensive experiments on nine scene text datasets to demonstrate the outstanding performance of the MSTD on character-level and line-level text instance localization and scene text recognition, where the MSTD significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art scene text detection methods and the sequence-to-sequence-learning-based scene text recognizers.

A linguistics landscape of an Indonesian metropolitan spot: A glimpse over Braga

This paper analyzes and explores the use of language in public spaces using the field of linguistics landscape. The purpose is to indicate and analyze the linguistic landscape features of billboards, road signs, commercial shop signs, campaign posters, etc that found in Braga Street, Bandung City. Braga Street is one of the famous areas in Bandung because Braga has many unique buildings so that people, especially youngsters come to Braga even just to hang out. The data collected by the writer are virtual spaces using the Google Street View application. The writer explores the Braga Street area with that application and then takes screenshots of those signs. Qualitative descriptive conducted in this paper by applying Shohamy and Gorter’s theory which refers to the analysis of the characteristics of bilingual and multilingual signs to better understand the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural city. The result is the use of monolingual and bilingual signs dominates especially in the private sector. Sundanese is still maintained by the people as evidenced by the existence of signs that use the local language. English is a foreign language that is quite often used by sign makers in this Braga Street area. This is because English can attract visitors by giving an impression, especially in the economic sector as their marketing strategy. Although the multilingual aspect in the Braga area is still very minimal, it can still show that the use of language in public spaces (Braga Street) areas is already varied.

Linguistic Landscape of Bilingual Shop Signs in Saudi Arabia

Shop signs are a visible indication of the linguistic landscape of a place, hence the need for public policies to control, particularly, bottom-up signs in situations where there are issues, such ensuring consistency and correct representation in the second language. To investigate the linguistic landscape of bilingual shop signs in Saudi Arabia, this study examines the lettering in bilingual shop signs in shopping malls in Riyadh and Jeddah in terms of relative size, information, and the quality of English-Arabic (E-A) and Arabic-English (A-E) transliteration or translation. This was done in view of the national policy in Saudi Arabia which aims to ensure correct Arabisation when inconsistencies have been observed in the Arab world. Moreover, it gives an indication of the linguistic landscape, which is necessary given the need to prepare the kingdom for the Saudi 2030 Vision and cater to the growing number of international visitors. Altogether, 184 signboards were observed and categorised, of which 68 were shortlisted for further analysis. Of these, 54 were A-E signs and 17 were E-A signs, with two in both categories. The majority (83.3%) of signs were bilingual with slight variation in relative size and display of information. Same sized lettering was displayed in 66.7%, and the same information in 64.8%. Remedial suggestions are given for language policy-makers to address the issue found of a few inconsistent and erroneous transliterations and spellings, which together accounted for 9.3%. Overall, the case is not as bad in Saudi Arabia as noted in some other Arab countries

An Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Retroreflectivity Performance of In-Service Road Traffic Signs

The road traffic signs in Sweden have no inventory system and it is unknown when a sign has reached the end of its service life and needs to be replaced. As a result, the road authorities do not have a systematic maintenance program for road traffic signs, and many signs which are not in compliance with the minimum retroreflectivity performance requirements are still found on the roads. Therefore, it is very important to find an inexpensive, safe, easy, and highly accurate method to judge the retroreflectivity performance of road signs. This will enable maintenance staff to determine the retroreflectivity of road signs without requiring measuring instruments for retroreflectivity or colors performance. As a first step toward the above goal, this paper aims to identify factors affecting the retroreflectivity of road signs. Two different datasets were used, namely, the VTI dataset from Sweden and NMF dataset from Denmark. After testing different models, two logarithmic regression models were found to be the best-fitting models, with R2 values of 0.50 and 0.95 for the VTI and NMF datasets, respectively. The first model identified the age, direction, GPS positions, color, and class of road signs as significant predictors, while the second model used age, color, and the class of road signs.

Evaluation of Google Image Translate in Rendering Arabic Signage into English

When people travel to another country for work or leisure, they regularly need a medium to help them understand the written messages in other languages. Google Translate offers a new service: translating the content of images (texts) instantly and freely into 100 languages powered by the Neural Machine Translation approach (NMT). In this vein, the current research paper attempts to evaluate the accuracy of Google Image Translate service in rendering the texts printed on Arabic signage: banners and road and shop signs from Arabic into English. Besides, it aims to identify the capacity of Google Translate in rendering Arabic signage into English effectively without the help of human translators. The paper adopts the Linguistic Error Analysis Framework of Costa et al. (2015) in analyzing the output of Google image service in terms of orthography, grammar, lexis, and semantics. The paper shows that Google Translate made the following errors while rendering the content of images into English: mistranslation, omission, additions, wrong choice, misordering, subject-verb disagreement, and semantic errors. In conclusion, the Google Image Translate service helps the users configure the gist of the image. However, a human translator is still needed since MT may not provide an adequate and effective translation as humans do.

Remembering a Great Man: A Conversation with Kwame Akoto of Almighty God Art Works

Remembering a Great Man: A Conversation with Kwame Akoto of Almighty God Art Works

A Novel Algorithm to Detect and Transmit Human-Directed Signboard Image Text to Vehicle Using 5G-Enabled Wireless Networks

The emerging 5G telecommunication technology uses novel aspects to fulfill the challenges of high data rate, ultra-low latency, broad bandwidth with the best user experience for text detection in sign board and thereafter transmission of identified information to the vehicles. This is performed on the images which are amorphous in nature or containing scenarios which are random or that cannot be determined. Detecting and transmission of textsover 5G wireless network from the unstructured images aids in many of the additional applications like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and 5G technolog such as an eMBB, mMTC, and URLLC for quality of service and customer satisfaction.This approach can be used to alert a driver about any road sign even from a captured video by using 5G wireless network irrespective of the weathercondition or any obstacle which may make sign boards difficult to see for drivers. The algorithm uses Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) feature detector. The algorithm contains several steps which are briefly described in the paper.

A SIGN IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: JORDANIAN SHOP SIGNS IN VARIOUS LANGUAGES

Language is a powerful tool for communication in a variety of fields all around the world. People sometimes communicate in a variety of fields by combining the official language with languages used in other nations. Education, health, business, commerce, and other fields are among them. In Jordan, the commercial sector demonstrates the importance of the native tongue, as well as the diversity of languages used in store signage. This research looks on the languages used on commercial store signage in Irbid. According to the findings of this study, 36 percent of commercial store signs are monolingual English, which indicates that they are written entirely in English. Furthermore, 36% of store signs are bilingual English – Arabic, meaning they are written in both English and Arabic. Other foreign languages, such as French, are written on 18% of store signs, whereas Arabic, the official language of Jordanians, is inscribed on 9%. In conclusion, this study shows that English is widely utilized in the business sector in Irbid, as opposed to other foreign languages, which are infrequently used. It also highlights the strong use of English and Arabic, indicating that Irbid is a moderate and conservative city that values the use of the native tongue alongside English as a foreign language.

AN ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE IN INNER MONGOLIA AUTONOMOUS REGION: A CASE STUDY OF BAYANNUR CITY

As the main carrier of information, language signs can be seen everywhere in public, such as various shop signs, guideboards, warning signs, billboards and posters. However, people rarely pay attention to them and the meaning they embody. Linguistic landscape is one of the hot topics in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. Therefore, based on the research framework of Rosenbaum’s investigation of Keren Kayemet Street in Jerusalem, Israel, this paper intends to investigate the linguistic landscape of public signs in Bayannur City of Inner Mongolia, in order to understand the language use in the linguistic landscape of Bayannur City. In addition, relevant empirical data can provide some reference for the language planning and language policies of the City language Commission and government departments.

THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF BANSKÁ BYSTRICA

This paper focuses on the quantitative and qualitative systematic analysis of the multimodal semiosphere pertaining to the linguistic landscape of the selected urban spaces in Banská Bystrica. It examines public urban communication in the form of text-based public signs (road signs, billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, public signs, etc.) as information units to which passers-by are exposed. This paper explores both local features and commonalities that may show the patterns of globalisation, as well as general areal and historical patterns.

Linguistic Landscape of Bilingual Shop Signs in Saudi Arabia

Linguistic Landscape of Bilingual Shop Signs in Saudi Arabia

Development Of Community-Based Tourism To Increase Regional Original Income (PAD) In Maros Regency

This research to find out what is lacking and what should be done by the community around Rammang-Rammang tourism in Maros Regency in order to improve the quality of recreational tourism and increase local revenue. Thus, researchers want to conduct observations and research at the Rammang-Rammang Tourism Object with the title "Community Based Tourism Development to Increase Regional Original Income (PAD) in Maros Regency." Using descriptive research type which through qualitative research methods is to provide an overview of the problems studied related to the development of community-based tourism (Community Based Tourism). Based on the results of the research and discussion presented in the previous chapter on Community Based Tourism Development in Rammang-rammang Tourism, it can be concluded that natural and cultural resources are one of the main factors that attract tourists to visit, because There are typical foods of the Bugis and Makassar tribes, namely light snacks such as various kinds of cakes. From the Community Organizations in Rammang-Rammang Tourism, they still prioritize a sense of mutual cooperation between fellow residents to manage Rammang-Rammang tourism, because the Youth Organization in the village is still in the process of being formed. Management at Rammang-Rammang Tourism has no interference from any party, therefore the tourism management system is fully given to the community but is still under the supervision of the government. Meanwhile, Learning / Learning is still in the construction stage of its facilities such as information boards, sign boards, landmarks, and location plans.Keywords: Community Development, Locally-generated revenue, Tourism Development