Abstract
The rapid development and application of AI in intelligent transportation systems has widely impacted daily life. The application of an intelligent visual aid for traffic sign information recognition can provide assistance and even control vehicles to ensure safe driving. The field of autonomous driving is booming, and great progress has been made. Many traffic sign recognition algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed because of the fast execution and high recognition rate of CNNs. However, this work addresses a challenging question in the autonomous driving field: how can traffic signs be recognized in real time and accurately? The proposed method designs an improved VGG convolutional neural network and has significantly superior performance compared with existing schemes. First, some redundant convolutional layers are removed efficiently from the VGG-16 network, and the number of parameters is greatly reduced to further optimize the overall architecture and accelerate calculation. Furthermore, the BN (batch normalization) layer and GAP (global average pooling) layer are added to the network to improve the accuracy without increasing the number of parameters. The proposed method needs only 1.15 M when using the improved VGG-16 network. Finally, extensive experiments on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) Dataset are performed to evaluate our proposed scheme. Compared with traditional methods, our scheme significantly improves recognition accuracy while maintaining good real-time performance.












Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Yu J, Li J, Yu Z, Huang Q (2019) Multimodal transformer with multi-view visual representation for image captioning. IEEE Trans Circ Syst Video Technol. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSVT.2019.2947482
Gao H, Liu C, Li Y, Yang X (2020) V2VR: reliable hybrid-network-oriented V2V data transmission and routing considering rsus and connectivity probability. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2020.2983835
Zhang Z, Tan T, Huang K, Wang Y (2012) Practical camera calibration from moving objects for traffic scene surveillance. IEEE Trans Circ Syst Video Technol 23(3):518–533. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSVT.2012.2210670
Zhang Zhaoxiang, Huang Kaiqi, Wang Yunhong, Li Min (2013) View independent object classification by exploring scene consistency information for traffic scene surveillance. Neurocomputing 99:250–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2012.07.008
Yao C, Bai X, Liu W et al (2014) Human detection using learned part alphabet and pose dictionary. In: European conference on computer vision. Springer, Cham, pp 251–266
Yu J, Tan M, Zhang H, Tao D, Rui Y (2019) Hierarchical deep click feature prediction for fine-grained image recognition. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2019.2932058
Hu C, Bai X, Qi L, Wang X, Xue G, Mei L (2015) Learning discriminative pattern for real-time car brand recognition. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 16(6):3170–3181. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2015.2441051
Xia Yingjie, Weiwei Xu, Zhang Luming, Shi Xingmin, Mao Kuang (2015) Integrating 3d structure into traffic scene understanding with rgb-d data. Neurocomputing 151:700–709. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2014.05.091
Honghao G, Yueshen X, Yin Yuyu et al (2019) Context-aware QoS prediction with neural collaborative filtering for Internet-of-Things services. IEEE Internet Things J. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2019.2956827
Ling Q, Yan J, Li F, Zhang Y (2014) A background modeling and foreground segmentation approach based on the feedback of moving objects in traffic surveillance systems. Neurocomputing 133:32–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2013.11.034
Stallkamp J, Schlipsing M, Salmen J, Igel C (2011) The German traffic sign recognition benchmark: a multi-class classification competition. In: The international joint conference on neural networks. IEEE, pp 1453–1460. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2011.6033395
Mathias M, Timofte R, Benenson R, Van Gool L (2013) Traffic sign recognition—how far are we from the solution?. In: The international joint conference on neural networks (IJCNN). IEEE, pp 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2013.6707049
Rachmadi R, Uchimura K, Koutagi G, Komokata Y (2016) Japan road sign classification using cascade convolutional neural network. In: ITS (Intelligent Transport System) World Congress, Tokyo, pp 1-12. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.25436.18566
Zhu Z, Liang D, Zhang S, Huang X, Li B, Hu S (2016) Traffic-sign detection and classification in the wild. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2110–2118
Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv:1409.1556
Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE (2012) Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 1097–1105
Zeiler MD, Fergus R (2014) Visualizing and understanding convolutional networks. European conference on computer vision. Springer, Cham, pp 818–833
Szegedy C, Liu W, Jia Y et al (2015) Going deeper with convolutions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1–9
Ioffe S, Szegedy C (2015) Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. arXiv:1502.03167
Szegedy C, Vanhoucke V, Ioffe S, Shlens J, Wojna Z (2016) Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2818–2826
Szegedy C, Ioffe S, Vanhoucke, V, Alemi A (2017) Inception-v4, inception-resnet and the impact of residual connections on learning. In: Thirty-first AAAI conference on artificial intelligence. arXiv:1602.07261
He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2016) Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 770–778
Hu J, Shen L, Sun G (2018) Squeeze-and-excitation networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7132–7141
Huang G, Liu Z, Van Der Maaten L, Weinberger KQ (2017) Densely connected convolutional networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 4700–4708
Sandler M, Howard A, Zhu M, Zhmoginov A, Chen LC (2018) Mobilenetv2: inverted residuals and linear bottlenecks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 4510–4520
Ma N, Zhang X, Zheng HT, Sun J (2018) Shufflenet v2: practical guidelines for efficient cnn architecture design. In: Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV), pp 116–131
CireşAn D, Meier U, Masci J, Schmidhuber J (2012) Multi-column deep neural network for traffic sign classification. Neural Netw 32:333–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2012.02.023
Jin J, Fu K, Zhang C (2014) Traffic sign recognition with hinge loss trained convolutional neural networks. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 15(5):1991–2000. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2014.2308281
Cireşan D, Meier U, Masci J, Schmidhuber J (2011) A committee of neural networks for traffic sign classification. In: The international joint conference on neural networks. IEEE, pp 1918–1921. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2011.6033458
Wong A, Shafiee MJ, Jules MS (2018) MicronNet: a highly compact deep convolutional neural network architecture for real-time embedded traffic sign classification. IEEE Access 6:59803–59810. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2873948
Gao H, Huang W, Duan Y (2020) The cloud-edge based dynamic reconfiguration to service workflow for mobile ecommerce environments: a QoS prediction perspective. ACM Trans Internet Technol. https://doi.org/10.1145/3391198
Chang CC, Lin CJ (2011) LIBSVM: a library for support vector machines. ACM Trans Intell Systems Technol (TIST) 2(3):1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/1961189.1961199
Breiman L (2001) Random forests. Mach Learn 45(1):5–32. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010933404324
Dalal N, Triggs B (2005) Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In: IEEE computer society conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR’05), vol 1. IEEE, pp 886–893. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2005.177
Duda RO, Hart PE (1972) Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures. Commun ACM 15(1):11–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/361237.361242
Russakovsky O, Deng J, Su H et al (2015) Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge. Int J Comput Vis 115(3):211–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0816-y
Stallkamp J, Schlipsing M, Salmen J, Igel C (2012) Man vs. computer: benchmarking machine learning algorithms for traffic sign recognition. Neural Netw 32:323–332. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2012.02.016
Lin M, Chen Q, Yan S (2013) Network in network. arXiv:1312.4400
Bell S, Lawrence Zitnick C, Bala K, Girshick R (2016) Inside-outside net: detecting objects in context with skip pooling and recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2874–2883
Liu W, Rabinovich A, Berg A C (2015) Parsenet: looking wider to see better. arXiv:1506.04579
Li J, Wei Y, Liang X et al (2016) Attentive contexts for object detection. IEEE Trans Multimed 19(5):944–954. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2016.2642789
Li X, Chen S, Hu X, Yang J (2019) Understanding the disharmony between dropout and batch normalization by variance shift. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2682-2690
Martín A, Ashish A, Paul B et al (2015) TensorFlow: large-scale machine learning on heterogeneous systems. https://www.tensorflow.org
Chollet F et al (2015) Keras. https://github.com/keras-team/keras
Kingma DP, Ba J (2014) Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv:1412.6980
Luo L, Xiong Y, Liu Y, Sun X (2019) Adaptive gradient methods with dynamic bound of learning rate. arXiv:1902.09843
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 61972357, No. 61672337).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bi, Z., Yu, L., Gao, H. et al. Improved VGG model-based efficient traffic sign recognition for safe driving in 5G scenarios. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 12, 3069–3080 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-020-01185-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-020-01185-5