Deep learning in Transportation: Optimized driven deep residual networks for Arabic traffic sign recognition

Car manufacturers around the globe are in a race to design and build driverless cars. The concept of driverless is also being applied to any moving vehicle such as wheelchairs, golf cars, tourism carts in recreational parks, etc. To achieve this ambition, vehicles must be able to drive safely on streets stay within required lanes, sense moving objects, sense obstacles, and be able to read traffic signs that are permanent and even temporary signs. It will be a completely integrated system of the Internet of Things (IoT), Global Positioning System (GPS), Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL), and Smart Technologies. A lot of work has been done on traffic sign recognition in the English language, but little has been done for Arabic traffic sign recognition. The concepts used for traffic sign recognition can also be applied to indoor signage, smart cities, supermarket labels, and others. In this paper, we propose two optimized Residual Network (ResNet) models (ResNet V1 and ResNet V2) for automatic traffic sign recognition using the Arabic Traffic Signs (ArTS) dataset. Additionally, the authors developed a new dataset specifically for Arabic Traffic Sign recognition consisting of 2,718 images taken from random places in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The optimized proposed ResNet V1 model achieved the highest training and validation accuracies of 99.18% and 96.14%, respectively. It should be noted here that the authors accounted for both overfitting and underfitting in the proposed models. It is also important to note that the results achieved using the proposed models outperform similar methods proposed in the extant literature for the same dataset or similar-size dataset.