Easily deployable real-time detection method for small traffic signs

Traffic sign detection technology plays an important role in driver assistance systems and automated driving systems. This paper proposes DeployEase-YOLO, a real-time high-precision detection scheme based on an adaptive scaling channel pruning strategy, to facilitate the deployment of detectors on edge devices. More specifically, based on the characteristics of small traffic signs and complex background, this paper first of all adds a small target detection layer to the basic architecture of YOLOv5 in order to improve the detection accuracy of small traffic signs. Then, when capturing specific scenes with large fields of view, higher resolution and richer pixel information are preserved instead of directly scaling the image size. Finally, the network structure is pruned and compressed using an adaptive scaling channel pruning strategy, and the pruned network is subjected to a secondary sparse pruning operation. The number of parameters and computations is greatly reduced without increasing the depth of the network structure or the influence of the input image size, thus compressing the model to the minimum within the compressible range. Experimental results show that the model trained by Experimental results show that the model trained by DeployEase-YOLO achieves higher accuracy and a smaller size on TT100k, a challenging traffic sign detection dataset. Compared to existing methods, DeployEase-YOLO achieves an average accuracy of 93.3%, representing a 1.3% improvement over the state-of-the-art YOLOv7 network, while reducing the number of parameters and computations to 41.69% and 59.98% of the original, respectively, with a compressed volume of 53.22% of the previous one. This proves that the DeployEase-YOLO has a great deal of potential for use in the area of small traffic sign detection. The algorithm outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and speed, and has the advantage of a compressed network structure that facilitates deployment of the model on resource-limited devices. © 2024 – IOS Press. All rights reserved.