Traffic Sign Detection Based on Channel Attention and Feature Enhancement

Traffic signs on the road contain a large amount of semantic information about traffic rules, and rapid and accurate access to this information helps to achieve higher levels of assisted driving functions, thus improving vehicle's safety performance. In view of the traffic signs are susceptible to external factors and the problems of high similarity between categories and small size, this paper made targeted improvements in data augmentation, feature extraction and feature enhancement based on YOLOv5s model. In the data augmentation part, color space transformation and geometric transformation matrix were used to simulate the possible color changes and shape changes of traffic signs in actual scenes, and the Mosaic algorithm and Copy-paste algorithm were used to improve the number of tiny traffic signs in the training set and the richness of the background. In the feature extraction part, a feature extraction module based on channel attention calibration was constructed to improve the model's ability to discriminate similar features. In the feature enhancement part, the number of prediction branches and downsampling multiplier were optimized by fusing shallow features and deep features with a dual-path enhancement structure, so as to increase the detection accuracy of tiny traffic signs. In addition, the K-means++ algorithm was used to cluster the prior bounding box templates and construct the loss function based on the CIoU metric, thus reducing the difficulty of the prior bounding box regression. Experiments on the TT100K and CCTSDB dataset test show that the mAP@0.5 of the proposed model is 88.8% and 83.5% respectively, and the speed of the model is 120.5 f/s and 114.7 f/s respectively. Compared with the existing traffic sign detection models, the proposed model reaches the advanced level in both accuracy and speed. Comparison experiments for data augmentation algorithms, prediction branches, and channel attention module positions further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed specific optimization methods.