Recognition of Chinese Traffic Signs from Street Views

Report, 2015

This technical report describes the research work on automatic recognizing Chinese traffic signs from an implicit public resource, i.e. street views. First, we give a comprehensive survey on Chinese traffic signs and introduce our approaches for collecting street view images that can be used for experimental purposes. Then, we introduce our coarse-to-fine recognition framework consisting of sign detection, sign salient region segmentation, feature extraction (including simple text recognition from signs), and subsequent sign classification. We also propose to incrementally build a sign dataset in a semi-automatic way, aiming at reducing manual effort. Experiments on collected datasets for both sign detection and classification have validated that the proposed framework is feasible and capable of recognizing multiple categories of Chinese traffic signs in a single input image.