Traffic sign recognition based on attribute-refinement cascaded convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Traffic sign recognition is a critical module of intelligent transportation system. Observing that a subtle difference may cause misclassification when the actual class and the predictive class share the same attributes such as shape, color, function and so on, we propose a two-stage cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs) framework, called attribute-refinement cascaded CNNs, to train the traffic sign classifier by taking full advantage of attribute-supervisory signals. The first stage CNN is trained with class label as supervised signals, while the second stage CNN is trained on super classes separately according to auxiliary attributes of traffic signs for further refinement. Experiments show that the proposed hierarchical cascaded framework can extract the deep information of similar categories, improve discrimination of the model and increase classification accuracy of traffic signs.