Detection of U.S. Traffic Signs

This paper presents a comprehensive research study of the detection of U.S. traffic signs. Until now, the research in Traffic Sign Recognition systems has been centered on European traffic signs, but signs can look very different across different parts of the world, and a system that works well in Europe may indeed not work in the U.S. We go over the recent advances in traffic sign detection and discuss the differences in signs across the world. Then we present a comprehensive extension to the publicly available LISA-TS traffic sign data set, almost doubling its size, now with high-definition-quality footage. The extension is made with testing of tracking sign detection systems in mind, providing videos of traffic sign passes. We apply the Integral Channel Features and Aggregate Channel Features detection methods to U.S. traffic signs and show performance numbers outperforming all previous research on U.S. signs (while also performing similarly to the state of the art on European signs). Integral Channel Features have previously been used successfully for European signs, whereas Aggregate Channel Features have never been applied to the field of traffic signs. We take a look at the performance differences between the two methods and analyze how they perform on very distinctive signs, as well as white, rectangular signs, which tend to blend into their environment.