Traffic Sign Recognition Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Traffic sign recognition (TSR) is an important component of automated driving system. It is a rather challenging task to design a high-performance classifier for the TSR system. In this paper, we proposed a new method for TSR system based on deep convolutional neural network. In order to enhance the expression of the network, a novel structure (dubbed block-layer below) which combines Network-in-Network and residual connection was designed. Our network has 10 layers with parameters (block-layer be seen as a single layer); the first seven are alternate convolutional layers and block-layers, and the remaining three are fully-connected layers. We trained our TSR network on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset. To reduce overfitting, we did data augmentation on the training images and employed a regularization method named dropout. We also employed a mechanism called Batch Normalization which has been proved to be efficient for accelerating the training of deep neural networks. To speed up the training, we used an efficient GPU to accelerate the convolutional operation. On the test dataset of GTSRB, we achieve the accuracy rate of 98.96%, exceeding the human average raters.