Autonomous Driving: Traffic Sign Classification

Autonomous Driving and Advance Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are revolutionizing the way we drive and the future of mobility. Among ADAS, Traffic Sign Classification is an important technique which assists the driver to easily interpret traffic signs on the road. In this thesis, we used the powerful combination of Image Processing and Deep Learning to pre-process and classify the traffic signs. Recent studies in Deep Learning show us how good a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is for image classification and there are several state-of-the-art models with classification accuracies over 99 % existing out there. This shaped our thesis to focus more on tackling the current challenges and some open-research cases. We focussed more on performance tuning by modifying the existing architectures with a trade-off between computations and accuracies. Our research areas include enhancement in low light/noisy conditions by adding Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) connections, and contribution to a universal-regional dataset with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The results obtained on the test data are comparable to the state-of-the-art models and we reached accuracies above 98% after performance evaluation in different framework