Recognizing traffic signs using flexible Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) grid

Document Type : Article

Authors

1 Department of Electrical Engineering, NFC Institute of Engineering and Technology, Multan, Pakistan

2 Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan

Abstract

Traffic sign recognition can be performed in two phases of detection and recognition; detection deals with sensing a trac sign in real-world image or video frame while recognition is about reading its contents. A traffic signs database may contain samples with varying font sizes and styles used for printing the interior of a traffic sign and the contents may also be shifted away from the center of gravity. In this paper, we utilize the energy compaction property of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to propose a Trac Sign Recognition (TSR) system, which can generate invariant features for varying font styles and scaled up, scaled down, and translated contents of a sign. Experiments on synthetic and real-world images datasets show that the features generated by our proposed method have great intra-class similarity and inter-class variation. We have also shown that our proposed method outperforms Eigen based recognition method [1] and is comparable with the Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) approach [2] using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classi er.

Main Subjects