Exploiting synergies of mobile mapping sensors and deep learning for traffic sign recognition systems

This paper presents an efficient two-stage traffic sign recognition system. First, 3D point cloud data is acquired by a LINX Mobile Mapper system and processed to automatically detect traffic signs based on their retro-reflective material. Then, classification is carried out over the point cloud projection on RGB images applying a Deep Neural Network which comprises convolutional and spatial transformer layers. This network is evaluated in three European traffic sign datasets. On the GTSRB, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art published works and achieves top-1 rank with an accuracy of 99.71%. Furthermore, a Spanish traffic sign recognition dataset is released. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.