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Lightweight deep network for traffic sign classification

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Abstract

Deeper neural networks have achieved great results in the field of computer vision and have been successfully applied to tasks such as traffic sign recognition. However, as traffic sign recognition systems are often deployed in resource-constrained environments, it is critical for the network design to be slim and accurate in these instances. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose two novel lightweight networks that can obtain higher recognition precision while preserving less trainable parameters in the models. Knowledge distillation transfers the knowledge in a trained model, called the teacher network, to a smaller model, called the student network. Moreover, to improve the accuracy of traffic sign recognition, we also implement a new module in our teacher network that combines two streams of feature channels with dense connectivity. To enable easy deployment on mobile devices, our student network is a simple end-to-end architecture containing five convolutional layers and a fully connected layer. Furthermore, by referring to the values of batch normalization (BN) scaling factors towards zero to identify insignificant channels, we prune redundant channels from the student network, yielding a compact model with accuracy comparable to that of more complex models. Our teacher network exhibited an accuracy rate of 93.16% when trained and tested on the CIFAR-10 general dataset. Using the knowledge of our teacher network, we train the student network on the GTSRB and BTSC traffic sign datasets. Thus, our student model uses only 0.8 million parameters while still achieving accuracy of 99.61% and 99.13% respectively on both datasets. All experimental results show that our lightweight networks can be useful when deploying deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on mobile embedded devices.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61772454, Grant 61811530332, and Grant 61811540410; in part by the Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department under Grant 16A008; in part by the "Double First-class" International Cooperation and Development Scientific Research Project of Changsha University of Science and Technology under Grant 2019IC34; in part by the Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Fund of Hunan Province under Grant CX2018B565; in part by the Postgraduate Training Innovation Base Construction Project of Hunan Province under Grant 2017-451-30; and in part by the Postgraduate Course Construction Fund of CSUST under Grant KC201611.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, Hunan Province, China

    Jianming Zhang, Wei Wang, Chaoquan Lu & Jin Wang

  2. Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing of Big Data on Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China

    Jianming Zhang, Wei Wang, Chaoquan Lu & Jin Wang

  3. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, 632014, India

    Arun Kumar Sangaiah

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  1. Jianming Zhang
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  2. Wei Wang
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  3. Chaoquan Lu
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  4. Jin Wang
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  5. Arun Kumar Sangaiah
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Correspondence to Arun Kumar Sangaiah.

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Zhang, J., Wang, W., Lu, C. et al. Lightweight deep network for traffic sign classification. Ann. Telecommun. 75, 369–379 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-019-00731-9

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