Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Driving in Virtual Simulation Environment
This is an incremental improvement for autonomous driving systems in virtual simulation environments.
The study tackled traffic sign detection and recognition for autonomous driving by revising RetinaNet with image cropping and more anchors, achieving extremely good performance under ideal conditions but failing in bad weather or with similar speed limit signs.
This study developed a traffic sign detection and recognition algorithm based on the RetinaNet. Two main aspects were revised to improve the detection of traffic signs: image cropping to address the issue of large image and small traffic signs; and using more anchors with various scales to detect traffic signs with different sizes and shapes. The proposed algorithm was trained and tested in a series of autonomous driving front-view images in a virtual simulation environment. Results show that the algorithm performed extremely well under good illumination and weather conditions. Its drawbacks are that it sometimes failed to detect object under bad weather conditions like snow and failed to distinguish speed limits signs with different limit values.