TRD-YOLO: A Real-Time, High-Performance Small Traffic Sign Detection Algorithm

Traffic sign detection is an important part of environment-aware technology and has great potential in the field of intelligent transportation. In recent years, deep learning has been widely used in the field of traffic sign detection, achieving excellent performance. Due to the complex traffic environment, recognizing and detecting traffic signs is still a challenging project. In this paper, a model with global feature extraction capabilities and a multi-branch lightweight detection head is proposed to increase the detection accuracy of small traffic signs. First, a global feature extraction module is proposed to enhance the ability of extracting features and capturing the correlation within the features through self-attention mechanism. Second, a new, lightweight parallel decoupled detection head is proposed to suppress redundant features and separate the output of the regression task from the classification task. Finally, we employ a series of data enhancements to enrich the context of the dataset and improve the robustness of the network. We conducted a large number of experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm is 86.3%, the recall is 82.1%, the mAP@0.5 is 86.5% and the mAP@0.5:0.95 is 65.6% in TT100K dataset, while the number of frames transmitted per second is stable at 73, which meets the requirement of real-time detection.