Traffic Sign Recognition Using a Synthetic Data Training Approach

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) is a crucial component in many automotive applications, such as driver assistance, sign maintenance, and vehicle autonomy. In this paper, we present an efficient approach to training a machine learning-based TSR solution. In our choice of recognition method, we have opted for convolutional neural networks, which have demonstrated best-in-class performance in previous works on TSR. One of the challenges related to training deep neural networks is the requirement for a large amount of training data. To circumvent the tedious process of acquiring and manually labelling real data, we investigate the use of synthetically generated images. Our networks, trained on only synthetic data, are capable of recognising traffic signs in challenging real-world footage. The classification results achieved on the GTSRB benchmark are seen to outperform existing state-of-the-art solutions.