Improved YOLOv5-based for small traffic sign detection under complex weather

Traffic sign detection is a challenging task for unmanned driving systems. In the traffic sign detection process, the object size and weather conditions vary widely, which will have a certain impact on the detection accuracy. In order to solve the problem of balanced detecting precision of traffic sign recognition model in different weather conditions, and it is difficult to detect occluded objects and small objects, this paper proposes a small object detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv5s in complex weather. First, we add the coordinate attention(CA) mechanism in the backbone, a light-weight yet effective module, embedding the location information of traffic signs into the channel attention to improve the feature extraction ability of the network. Second, we exploit effectively fine-grained features about small traffic signs from the shallower layers by adding one prediction head to YOLOv5s. Finally, we use Alpha-IoU to improve the original positioning loss CIoU, improving the accuracy of bbox regression. Applying this model to the recently proposed CCTSDB 2021 dataset, for small objects, the precision is 88.1%, and the recall rate is 79.8%, compared with the original YOLOv5s model, it is improved by 12.5% and 23.9% respectively, and small traffic signs can be effectively detected under different weather conditions, with low miss rate and high detection accuracy. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yang-0706/ImprovedYOLOv5s.