Identification of traffic signs for advanced driving assistance systems in smart cities using deep learning

The ability of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) is to identify and understand all objects around the vehicle under varying driving conditions and environmental factors is critical. Today’s vehicles are equipped with advanced driving assistance systems that make driving safer and more comfortable. A camera mounted on the car helps the system recognise and detect traffic signs and alerts the driver about various road conditions, like if construction work is ahead or if speed limits have changed. The goal is to identify the traffic sign and process the image in a minimal processing time. A custom convolutional neural network model is used to classify the traffic signs with higher accuracy than the existing models. Image augmentation techniques are used to expand the dataset artificially, and that allows one to learn how the image looks from different perspectives, such as when viewed from different angles or when it looks blurry due to poor weather conditions. The algorithms used to detect traffic signs are YOLO v3 and YOLO v4-tiny. The proposed solution for detecting a specific set of traffic signs performed well, with an accuracy rate of 95.85%.