Automatic Signboard Recognition in Low Quality Night Images
This addresses the challenge of robust traffic sign recognition for driver assistance and autonomous driving systems in poor lighting conditions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper tackled the problem of recognizing traffic signs in low-quality night images by enhancing images with a modified MIRNet model and detecting them with Yolov4, achieving a 5.40% increase in mAP@0.5 for low-quality images and overall mAP@0.5 of 96.75% on the GTSRB dataset.
An essential requirement for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technology is implementing a robust system for detecting and recognizing traffic signs. This system enables the vehicle to autonomously analyze the environment and make appropriate decisions regarding its movement, even when operating at higher frame rates. However, traffic sign images captured in inadequate lighting and adverse weather conditions are poorly visible, blurred, faded, and damaged. Consequently, the recognition of traffic signs in such circumstances becomes inherently difficult. This paper addressed the challenges of recognizing traffic signs from images captured in low light, noise, and blurriness. To achieve this goal, a two-step methodology has been employed. The first step involves enhancing traffic sign images by applying a modified MIRNet model and producing enhanced images. In the second step, the Yolov4 model recognizes the traffic signs in an unconstrained environment. The proposed method has achieved 5.40% increment in mAP@0.5 for low quality images on Yolov4. The overall mAP@0.5 of 96.75% has been achieved on the GTSRB dataset. It has also attained mAP@0.5 of 100% on the GTSDB dataset for the broad categories, comparable with the state-of-the-art work.