Towards Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection and Classification

Traffic sign recognition plays an important role in driver assistant systems and intelligent autonomous vehicles. Its real-time performance is highly desirable in addition to its recognition performance. This paper aims to deal with real-time traffic sign recognition, i.e., localizing what type of traffic sign appears in which area of an input image at a fast processing time. To achieve this goal, we first propose an extremely fast detection module, which is 20 times faster than the existing best detection module. Our detection module is based on traffic sign proposal extraction and classification built upon a color probability model and a color HOG. Then, we harvest from a convolutional neural network to further classify the detected signs into their subclasses within each superclass. Experimental results on both German and Chinese roads show that both our detection and classification methods achieve comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods, with significantly improved computational efficiency.