Total Recall: Understanding Traffic Signs using Deep Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Networks

Recognizing Traffic Signs using intelligent systems can drastically reduce the number of accidents happening world-wide. With the arrival of Self-driving cars it has become a staple challenge to solve the automatic recognition of Traffic and Hand-held signs in the major streets. Various machine learning techniques like Random Forest, SVM as well as deep learning models has been proposed for classifying traffic signs. Though they reach state-of-the-art performance on a particular data-set, but fall short of tackling multiple Traffic Sign Recognition benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a novel and one-for-all architecture that aces multiple benchmarks with better overall score than the state-of-the-art architectures. Our model is made of residual convolutional blocks with hierarchical dilated skip connections joined in steps. With this we score 99.33% Accuracy in German sign recognition benchmark and 99.17% Accuracy in Belgian traffic sign classification benchmark. Moreover, we propose a newly devised dilated residual learning representation technique which is very low in both memory and computational complexity

VSSA-NET: Vertical Spatial Sequence Attention Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Although traffic sign detection has been studied for years and great progress has been made with the rise of deep learning technique, there are still many problems remaining to be addressed. For complicated real-world traffic scenes, there are two main challenges. Firstly, traffic signs are usually small size objects, which makes it more difficult to detect than large ones; Secondly, it is hard to distinguish false targets which resemble real traffic signs in complex street scenes without context information. To handle these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning method for traffic sign detection in complex environments. Our contributions are as follows: 1) We propose a multi-resolution feature fusion network architecture which exploits densely connected deconvolution layers with skip connections, and can learn more effective features for the small size object; 2) We frame the traffic sign detection as a spatial sequence classification and regression task, and propose a vertical spatial sequence attention (VSSA) module to gain more context information for better detection performance. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method, we do experiments on several traffic sign datasets as well as the general object detection dataset and the results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio