Recognition of Brazilian vertical traffic signs and lights from a car using Single Shot Multi box Detector

Abstract

This work presents an automated system for recognizing Brazilian vertical traffic signs and lights using artificial intelligence. The main objective of the system is to contribute to road safety by alerting drivers to potential risks such as speeding, alcohol consumption, and cell phone use, which could lead to severe accidents. The system’s core contribution lies in its ability to accurately recognize various traffic signs and lights, providing crucial warnings to drivers. To achieve this, the system utilizes a light version of the single shot multi box detector as its detection algorithm and experiments with three Mobilenet versions as base networks. The optimal Mobilenet version is selected based on a mean average precision higher than 80%, which guarantees reliable detection results. The dataset used for training and evaluation comprises images extracted from YouTube traffic videos, each annotated to create the necessary labels for training. Through this extensive experimentation, the system demonstrates its efficacy in achieving accurate and efficient detection. The results of the experiments are compared with other existing approaches and our work significantly advances the field by providing a tailored dataset, an optimized model, and also valuable insights into traffic sign and light recognition, collectively contributing to the improvement of road safety.