Toward an optimal convolutional neural network for traffic sign recognition

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) beat the human performance on German Traffic Sign Benchmark competition. Both the winner and the runner-up teams trained CNNs to recognize 43 traffic signs. However, both networks are not computationally efficient since they have many free parameters and they use highly computational activation functions. In this paper, we propose a new architecture that reduces the number of the parameters 27% and 22% compared with the two networks. Furthermore, our network uses Leaky Rectified Linear Units (ReLU) as the activation function that only needs a few operations to produce the result. Specifically, compared with the hyperbolic tangent and rectified sigmoid activation functions utilized in the two networks, Leaky ReLU needs only one multiplication operation which makes it computationally much more efficient than the two other functions. Our experiments on the Gertman Traffic Sign Benchmark dataset shows 0:6% improvement on the best reported classification accuracy while it reduces the overall number of parameters 85% compared with the winner network in the competition.

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