Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition Model Using Support Vector Machine and Histogram of Oriented Gradient

Abstract

Traffic signs are symbols erected on the sides of roads that convey the road instructions to its users. These signs are essential in conveying the instructions related to the movement of traffic in the streets. Automation of driving is essential for efficient navigation free of human errors, which could otherwise lead to accidents and disorganized movement of vehicles in the streets. Traffic sign detection systems provide an important contribution to automation of driving, by helping in efficient navigation through relaying traffic sign instructions to the system users. However, most of the existing techniques have proposed approaches that are mostly capable of detection through static images only. Moreover, to the best of the author’s knowledge, there exists no approach that uses video frames. Therefore, this article proposes a unique automated approach for detection and recognition of Bangladeshi traffic signs from the video frames using Support Vector Machine and Histogram of Oriented Gradient. This system would be immensely useful in the implementation of automated driving systems in Bangladeshi streets. By detecting and recognizing the traffic signs in the streets, the automated driving systems in Bangladesh will be able to effectively navigate the streets. This approach classifies the Bangladeshi traffic signs using Support Vector Machine classifier on the basis of Histogram of Oriented Gradient property. Through image processing techniques such as binarization, contour detection and identifying similarity to circle etc., this article also proposes the actual detection mechanism of traffic signs from the video frames. The proposed approach detects and recognizes traffic signs with 100% precision, 95.83% recall and 96.15% accuracy after running it on 78 Bangladeshi traffic sign videos, which comprise 6 different kinds of Bangladeshi traffic signs. In addition, a public dataset for Bangladeshi traffic signs has been created that can be used for other research purposes.