Abstract
Detecting small objects is a challenging task. We focus on a special case: the detection and classification of traffic signals in street views. We present a novel framework that utilizes a visual attention model to make detection more efficient, without loss of accuracy, and which generalizes. The attention model is designed to generate a small set of candidate regions at a suitable scale so that small targets can be better located and classified. In order to evaluate our method in the context of traffic signal detection, we have built a traffic light benchmark with over 15,000 traffic light instances, based on Tencent street view panoramas. We have tested our method both on the dataset we have built and the Tsinghua–Tencent 100K (TT100K) traffic sign benchmark. Experiments show that our method has superior detection performance and is quicker than the general faster RCNN object detection framework on both datasets. It is competitive with state-of-the-art specialist traffic sign detectors on TT100K, but is an order of magnitude faster. To show generality, we tested it on the LISA dataset without tuning, and obtained an average precision in excess of 90%.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61772298), Research Grant of Beijing Higher Institution Engineering Research Center, and the Tsinghua–Tencent Joint Laboratory for Internet Innovation Technology.
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Yifan Lu is currently a master student of the Graphics and Geometric Computing Group in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. He received his B.S. degree in biology from Wuhan University in 2013. His main research interests include computer vision and deep learning.
Jiaming Lu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His research interests are in computer vision and computer graphics.
Songhai Zhang received his Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University, China, in 2007. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His research interests include image and video processing, and geometric computing.
Peter Hall is leader of the Visual Computing Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. He is the director of the Centre for Digital Entertainment doctoral training centre. His total grant income totals over $15 million. He regularly publishes in tier one conferences and leading journals. He is on the Editorial Boards of Computer Graphics Forum and Computational Visual Media.
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Lu, Y., Lu, J., Zhang, S. et al. Traffic signal detection and classification in street views using an attention model. Comp. Visual Media 4, 253–266 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-018-0116-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-018-0116-x