Application of BW-ELM model on traffic sign recognition

Traffic sign recognition is an important and active research topic of intelligent transport system. With a constant increasing of the training database size, not only the recognition accuracy, but also the computation complexity should be considered in designing a feasible recognition approach. In this paper, an effective and efficient algorithm based on a relatively new artificial neural network, extreme learning machine (ELM), is proposed for traffic sign recognition. In the proposed algorithm, the locally normalized histograms of the oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors, which are extracted from the traffic sign images, are used as the features and the inputs of the ELM classification model. Moreover, the ratio of feature’s between-category to within-category sums of squares (BW) is designed as a feature selection criterion to improve the recognition accuracy and to decrease the computation burden. Application on a well known database, German traffic sign recognition benchmark (GTSRB) dataset, demonstrates the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed BWELM model.