Real-Time Detection Method for Small Traffic Signs Based on Yolov3

It is very challenging to detect traffic signs using a high-precision real-time approach in realistic scenes with respect to driver-assistance systems for driving vehicles and autonomous driving. To address this challenge, in this paper, a new detection scheme (named MSA_YOLOv3) is proposed to accurately achieve real-time localization and classification of small traffic signs. First, data augmentation is achieved using image mixup technology. Second, a multi-scale spatial pyramid pooling block is introduced into the Darknet53 network to enable the network to learn object features more comprehensively. Finally, a bottom-up augmented path is designed to enhance the feature pyramid in YOLOv3, and the result is to achieve accurate localization of objects by utilizing fine-grained features effectively in the lower layers. According to the tests on the TT100K dataset (which is a dataset for traffic sign detection), the performance of the proposed MSA_YOLOv3 is better than that of YOLOv3 in detecting small traffic signs. The detection speed of MSA_YOLOv3 is 23.81 FPS, and the mAP (mean Average Precision) reaches up to 86%.