Comparative Analysis of Transfer Learning-Based CNN Approaches for Recognition of Traffic Signs in Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Traffic signs recognition has a crucial role in enhancing the safety and efficienty of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This AVs can contribute to a cleaner and healthier environment by improving fuel efficiency, minimizing travel distances, and deacreasing air pollution. Many artificial intelligence (AI) approaches contribute to develop AVs. Therfore, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performance in image classification tasks for AVs, inculding traffic signs recognition. However, training deep CNNs from scratch for traffic sign recognition requires a significant amount of labeled data, which can be time-consuming and ressource-intensive to obtain. Transfer Learning, a technique that leverages pre-trained models on large-scale datasets,offers a promising solution by enabling the transfer of learned feautres from one task to another. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of three popular transfer learning based CNN approaches, namely ResNet, VGGNet, and MobileNet,for the recognition of traffic signs in the context of AVs.