A real-time and high-precision method for small traffic-signs recognition

As a fundamental element of the traffic system, traffic signs reduce the risk of accidents by providing essential information about the road condition to drivers, pedestrians, etc. With the rapid progress of computer vision and artificial intelligence, traffic-signs recognition systems have been applied for the advanced driver assistance system and auto driving system, to help drivers and self-driving vehicles capture the important road information precisely. However, in real applications, small traffic-signs recognition is still challenging. In this article, we propose an efficient method for small-size traffic-signs recognition, named traffic-signs recognition small-aware, with the inspiration of the state-of-the-art object detection framework YOLOv4 and YOLOv5. In general, there are four contributions in our work: (1) for the Backbone of the model, we introduce high-level features to construct a better detector head; (2) for the Neck of the model, receptive field block-cross is utilized for capturing the contextual information of feature map; (3) for the Head of the model, we refine the detector head grid to achieve more accurate detection of small traffic signs; (4) for the input, we propose a data augmentation method named Random Erasing-Attention, which can increase difficult samples and enhance the robustness of the model. Real experiments on the challenging dataset TT100K demonstrate that our method can achieve significant performance improvement compared with the state of the art. Moreover, it is a real-time method and shows huge potential applications in advanced driver assistance system and auto driving system.