Ongoing Experiments

Since coming back to university after the Christmas break and completing my January exams I’ve had plenty of time to continue my experimentation on the reading roadsigns project and thought I’d post a quick update on whats been going on.

Recently I’ve been running a number of experiments in Matlab using SIFT and attempting to get various roadsigns recognised by using a cropped training set for a particular sign and then matching it against keypoint descriptors found in a test image.

I’ve been gathering statistical data and dumping this out to a file for analysis and further work but I’ve also been generating match images for each roadsign tested against the most favorable image from the training set. To give people an idea with how this is progressing I include an example of a very successful result on a STOP sign below.

Good Result

Its not all rosy though and I’ve been given food for thought after my interim report and some failures of the SIFT algorithm in recognising certian signs.

In my initial experimentation with actual roadsigns I decided to go for a simple sign as this would be less likely to be susceptable to noise. This was in fact quite an unwise decision as SIFT works by finding particularly unique points and I had effectively removed the possiblity of it finding such points by using a simple sign. I include below a matches image for a No Entry sign.

No Entry Sign Result

As you can see, its actually quite noisy. This is a problem which got me thinking about how I can make the whole process more robust and forced me to return to some of my early research on object recognition.

If I can use SIFT as a pre-processor then I can identify signs quickly and easily that have many descriptors such as STOP signs and then use a more basic system such a a template or colour match to identify the simpler signs such as the No Entry sign. I could also do it the other way around and will need to perform tests to decide what the best order is.

I’m currently working on an idea that SIFT could be used to detect the presence of any sign (not which one it is, but where it is) and then further tests could perform the recognition. In addition I’m researching examples of where SIFT has been modified to be used in colour and also how best to display experimental results. I’m also in the process of writing code to fully automate my training and testing process in Matlab so I should be able to run batch jobs and get results and test theories quicker.

Watch this space for more updates – its all go!

 

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2 Comments

  1. Chathura Perera Said,

    November 4, 2010 @ 5:22 pm

    Hi,
    I’m also involving in a work which is to identify objects like traffic signs. So, if you could send me some sample matlab source codes, definitely my work will be easier.

    Thanks,

  2. zico Said,

    October 23, 2011 @ 11:36 am

    I wanna say thanks.If it is possible for you give me some references about road sings experiments in every topic.
    Thank u.

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