Knowledge-based Recurrent Attentive Neural Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Accurate Traffic Sign Detection (TSD) can help drivers make better decision according to the traffic regulations. TSD, regarded as a typical small object detection problem in some way, is fundamental in the field of self-driving and advanced driver assistance systems. However, small object detection is still an open question. In this paper, we proposed a human brain inspired network to handle this problem. Attention mechanism is an essential function of our brain, we used a novel recurrent attentive neural network to improve the detection accuracy in a fine-gained manner. Further, as we human can combine domain specific knowledge and intuitive knowledge to solve tricky tasks, we proposed an assumption that the location of the traffic signs obeys the reverse gaussian distribution, which means the location is around the central bias of every picture. Experimental result shows that our methods achieved better performance than several popular methods used in object detection.