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Exploiting temporal and spatial constraints in traffic sign detection from a moving vehicle

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Abstract

This paper addresses detection, tracking and recognition of traffic signs in video. Previous research has shown that very good detection recalls can be obtained by state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Unfortunately, satisfactory precision and localization accuracy are more difficultly achieved. We follow the intuitive notion that it should be easier to accurately detect an object from an image sequence than from a single image. We propose a novel two-stage technique which achieves improved detection results by applying temporal and spatial constraints to the occurrences of traffic signs in video. The first stage produces well-aligned temporally consistent detection tracks by managing many competing track hypotheses at once. The second stage improves the precision by filtering the detection tracks by a learned discriminative model. The two stages have been evaluated in extensive experiments performed on videos acquired from a moving vehicle. The obtained experimental results clearly confirm the advantages of the proposed technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Siniša Šegvić, Karla Brkić & Zoran Kalafatić

  2. Institute of Electrical Measurement and Measurement Signal Processing, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Axel Pinz

Authors
  1. Siniša Šegvić
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  2. Karla Brkić
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  3. Zoran Kalafatić
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  4. Axel Pinz
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Correspondence to Siniša Šegvić.

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Šegvić, S., Brkić, K., Kalafatić, Z. et al. Exploiting temporal and spatial constraints in traffic sign detection from a moving vehicle. Machine Vision and Applications 25, 649–665 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-011-0396-y

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