TSD-DETR: A lightweight real-time detection transformer of traffic sign detection for long-range perception of autonomous driving

The key to accurate perception and efficient decision making of autonomous driving is the long-range detection of traffic signs. Long-range detection of traffic signs has the problems of small traffic sign size and complex background. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a lightweight model for traffic sign detection based on real-time detection transformer (TSD-DETR). Firstly, the feature extraction module is constructed using multiple types of convolutional modules. The model extracts multi-scale features of different levels to enhance feature extraction ability. Then, small object detection module and detection head are designed to extract and detect shallow features. It can improve the detection of small traffic signs. Finally, Efficient Multi-Scale Attention is introduced to adjust the channel weights. It aggregates the output features of three parallel branches interactively. TSD-DETR achieves a mean average precision (mAp) of 96.8% on Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset. It is improved by 2.5% compared with real-time detection transformer. In small object detection, mAp improved by 9%. TSD-DETR achieves 99.4% mAp on the Changsha University of Science and Technology Chinese Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark dataset, with an improvement of 0.6%. The experimental results show that TSD-DETR reduces the number of parameters by 9.06M by optimizing the model structure. On the premise of ensuring the real-time performance of the model, the detection accuracy of the model is improved greatly. The results of ablation experiments show that the feature extraction module and small object detection module proposed in this paper are conducive to improving the detection accuracy.