EFFECT OF VARIOUS DIMENSION CONVOLUTIONAL LAYER FILTERS ON TRAFFIC SIGN CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY

• Main Authors: V. N. Sichkar, S. A. Kolyubin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Saint Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO University) 2019-01-01
• Series: Naučno-tehničeskij Vestnik Informacionnyh Tehnologij, Mehaniki i Optiki
• Subjects: traffic signs classification; convolutional neural network; convolutional layer filters; feature maps extraction; classification accuracy
• Online Access: https://ntv.ifmo.ru/file/article/18674.pdf

The paper presents the study of an effective classification method for traffic signs on the basis of a convolutional neural network with various dimension filters. Every model of convolutional neural network has the same architecture but different dimension of filters for convolutional layer. The studied dimensions of the convolution layer filters are: 3 × 3, 5 × 5, 9 × 9, 13 × 13, 15 × 15, 19 × 19, 23 × 23, 25 × 25 and 31 ×31. In each experiment, the input image is convolved with the filters of certain dimension and with certain processing depth of image borders, which depends directly on the dimension of the filters and varies from 1 to 15 pixels. Performances of the proposed methods are evaluated with German Traffic Sign Benchmarks (GTSRB). Images from this dataset were reduced to 32 × 32 pixels in dimension. The whole dataset was divided into three subsets: training, validation and testing. The effect of the dimension of the convolutional layer filters on the extracted feature maps is analyzed in accordance with the classification accuracy and the average processing time. The testing dataset contains 12000 images that do not participate in convolutional neural network training. The experiment results have demonstrated that every model shows high testing accuracy of more than 82%. The models with filter dimensions of 9 × 9, 15 × 15 and 19 × 19 achieve top three with the best results on classification accuracy equal to 86.4 %, 86 % and 86.8 %, respectively. The models with filter dimensions of 5 × 5, 3 × 3 and 13 × 13 achieve top three with the best results on the average processing time equal to 0.001879, 0.002046 and 0.002364 seconds, respectively. The usage of convolutional layer filter with middle dimension has shown not only the high classification accuracy of more than 86 %, but also the fast classification rate, that enables these models to be used in real-time applications.