Improved VGG Model for Road Traffic Sign Recognition

Road traffic sign recognition is an important task in intelligent transportation system. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved a breakthrough in computer vision tasks and made great success in traffic sign classification. In this paper, it presents a road traffic sign recognition algorithm based on a convolutional neural network. In natural scenes, traffic signs are disturbed by factors such as illumination, occlusion, missing and deformation, and the accuracy of recognition decreases, this paper proposes a model called Improved VGG (IVGG) inspired by VGG model. The IVGG model includes 9 layers, compared with the original VGG model, it is added max-pooling operation and dropout operation after multiple convolutional layers, to catch the main features and save the training time. The paper proposes the method which adds dropout and Batch Normalization (BN) operations after each fully-connected layer, to further accelerate the model convergence, and then it can get better classification effect. It uses the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset in the experiment. The IVGG model enhances the recognition rate of traffic signs and robustness by using the data augmentation and transfer learning, and the spent time is also reduced greatly.