Real-time detection network for tiny traffic sign using multi-scale attention module

As one of the key technologies of intelligent vehicles, traffic sign detection is still a challenging task because of the tiny size of its target object. To address the challenge, we present a novel detection network improved from yolo-v3 for the tiny traffic sign with high precision in real-time. First, a visual multi-scale attention module (MSAM), a light-weight yet effective module, is devised to fuse the multi-scale feature maps with channel weights and spatial masks. It increases the representation power of the network by emphasizing useful features and suppressing unnecessary ones. Second, we exploit effectively fine-grained features about tiny objects from the shallower layers through modifying backbone Darknet-53 and adding one prediction head to yolo-v3. Finally, a receptive field block is added into the neck of the network to broaden the receptive field. Experiments prove the effectiveness of our network in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. The mAP@0.5 of our network reaches 0.965 and its detection speed is 55.56 FPS for 512 × 512 images on the challenging Tsinghua-Tencent 100k (TT100k) dataset.