Traffic Sign Updates
Last month, we talked about the accuracy improvement of traffic sign recognition with the help of Mapillary users. Today, we would like to share some more updates on traffic signs.
One of the challenges of recognizing traffic signs globally is the appearance variation of traffic signs between different countries. There are two main standards for traffic signs: the Vienna Convention used by most European countries, and the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices(MUTCD) followed by most American and Asian countries.
Even within the same convention, we can see lots of variations of the same sign among different countries in the two tables of comparison for Europe and MUTCD.
Country-specific sign recognition
To handle these variations, we have been working with training country-specific detectors for traffic signs as well as a new naming normalization in Traffico.
Today, we are happy to introduce three completely new traffic sign recognition packages including Australia (75 classes), Brazil (82 classes), Canada (86 classs) as well as updated packages for Europe (32 signs added with country-variants) and USA (12 signs added, including US speed limits). In particular, with the release of the USA/Canada speed limit sign recognition, we can now detect the other major variant of speed limit signs in the world. Take a look at the detection of traffic signs with the newly introduced packages.
| Canada - Speed Limit | USA - Speed Limit |
|---|---|
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 |
| Australia - Koala Crossing | Australia - Kangaroo Crossing |
|---|---|
 |
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While we should drive safely in Australia with Koalas and Kangaroos in mind, it would be also fun to able to draw a map for Koala/Kangaroo distribution in the future.
Traffic sign API
With this update we support a total of five traffic sign packages in our API.
| Country | Total Classes | Package Version |
|---|---|---|
| Australia | 75 | trafficsign_au_2.0 |
| Brazil | 82 | trafficsign_br_5.0 |
| Canada | 86 | trafficsign_ca_2.0 |
| Europe | 79 | trafficsign_eu_6.0 |
| USA | 84 | trafficsign_us_3.0 |
The documentation is here.
Future plans
After this update, we plan to progressively release country-specific traffic sign recognition for countries all over the world. As always, there is no perfect recognition system out there (at least not yet ;)). Your feedback to the traffic sign recognition is invaluable to future accuracy improvements.
We would love to know what you think about these updates. Feel free to comment or contact us on email and twitter.
/Yubin and The Mapillary Team