Traffic Sign Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks YOLOv3 Algorithm

Nowadays, traffic sign recognition is disrupted through various external factors such as chromatic aberration, geographical separation, and brightness of lights. This eventually poses possible safety hazards during navigation in real life. To overcome this issue, a deeplearning based method is proposed in this research using YOLOv3 with DenseNet as the backbone design. This approach uses attention mechanism to accelerate the feature extraction process by minimizing the overhead due to high computations to optimize the latency problem. Secondly, it incorporates location-specific hierarchical network to increase the traffic sign detection performance in challenging circumstances such as magnitude and illumination variations while maintaining adaptability and flexibility. In addition to this Cross Stage Partial Network is fused with DenseNet to enhance the recognition accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed system. The experimental findings on the Chinese Traffic sign dataset, CCTSDB dataset, showed that the YOLOv3-DenseNet model exhibited significant detection efficiency of 97.6% than the other deep learning models considered for performance comparison. It is observed that the proposed model is capable enough to detect the traffic signs in complicated scenarios as well as in places where the traffic signs are placed in smaller dimensions.