Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition using a CNN Ensemble

In today’s world, almost everything we do has been simplified by automated tasks. In an attempt to focus on the road while driving, drivers often miss out on signs on the side of the road, which could be dangerous for them and for the people around them. This problem can be avoided if there was an efficient way to notify the driver without having them to shift their focus. Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition (TSDR) plays an important role here by detecting and recognizing a sign, thus notifying the driver of any upcoming signs. This not only ensures road safety, but also allows the driver to be at little more ease while driving on tricky or new roads. Another commonly faced problem is not being able to understand the meaning of the sign. With the help of this Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) application, drivers will no longer face the problem of understanding what the sign says. In this paper, we propose a method for Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition using image processing for the detection of a sign and an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the recognition of the sign. CNNs have a high recognition rate, thus making it desirable to use for implementing various computer vision tasks. TensorFlow is used for the implementation of the CNN. We have achieved higher than 99% recognition accuracies for circular signs on the Belgium and German data sets.