YOLO-TS: Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection With Enhanced Accuracy Using Optimized Receptive Fields and Anchor-Free Fusion

Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Moreover, to address the scarcity of traffic sign datasets, especially under adverse weather conditions, we introduce two novel datasets: Generated-TT100K-weather and CAWTSSS. Extensive evaluations conducted on challenging public benchmarks—including TT100K, CCTSDB2021, and GTSDB—as well as on our proposed datasets, demonstrate that YOLO-TS surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and inference speed.