Traffic sign detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv5

This paper introduces an enhanced YOLOv5 algorithm tailored for real-world traffic sign detection applications. Through the incorporation of Coordinate Attention after the SPPF module of the YOLOv5 backbone, the YOLOv5 neck pays more attention to key areas in the image and preserves accurate positional information. In response to the fact that traffic signs are mostly small targets, the PAN and FPN in the original algorithm's neck network are upgraded by substituting BiFPN for the previous feature fusion method, improving the algorithm's ability to detect traffic signs of different sizes, specifically targeting improved detection accuracy for small-scale targets. To validate the effectiveness of these modifications, we compared our improved model with other object detection model on the TT100K dataset and conducted ablation experiments. The experiments result revealed that the enhanced algorithm achieved an mAP of 94.2%, surpassing the original YOLOv5 model by 6.9%. The detection speed was 49.2 FPS, meeting the real-time requirements.