Soft Radial Basis Cellular Neural Network (SRB-CNN) based robust low-cost truck detection using a single presence detection sensor

Abstract This paper does present a comprehensive concept for a robust and reliable truck detection involving solely one single presence sensor (e.g. an inductive loop, but also any other presence sensor) at a signalized traffic junction. Hereby, two operations modes are distinguished: (a) during green traffic light phases, and (b) a much challenging case, during red traffic light phases. First, it is shown how difficult the underlying classification task is, this mainly due to strongly overlapped classes, which cannot be easily separated by simple hyper-planes. Then, a novel soft radial basis cellular neural/nonlinear network (SRB-CNN) based concept is developed, validated and extensively benchmarked with a selection of the best representatives of the current related state-of-the-art classification concepts (namely the following: support vector machines with radial basis function, artificial neural network, naive Bayes, and decision trees). For benchmarking purposes, all selected competing classifiers do use the same features and the superiority of the novel CNN based classifier is thereby underscored, as it strongly outperforms the other ones. This novel SRB-CNN based concept does satisfactorily fulfill the hard industrial requirements regarding robustness, low-cost, high processing speed, low memory consumption, and the capability to be deployed in low cost embedded systems.