Portable Convolution Neural Networks for Traffic Sign Recognition in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have the strength in traffic-sign classification in terms of high accuracy. However, CNN models usually contains multiple layers with a large number of parameters consequently leading to a large model size. The bulky model size of CNN models prevents them from the wide deployment in mobile and portable devices in Intelligent Transportation Systems. In this paper, we design and develop a portable convolutional neural network (namely portable CNN) structure used for traffic-sign classification. This portable CNN model contains a stacked convolutional structure consisting of factorization and compression modules. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed Portable CNN model. Experimental results show that our model has the advantages of smaller model size while maintaining high classification accuracy, compared with conventional CNN models.