Advancing Traffic Sign Recognition: Explainable Deep CNN for Enhanced Robustness in Adverse Environments

This paper presents a traffic sign recognition (TSR) system based on the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, which proves to be extremely accurate in recognizing traffic signs under challenging conditions such as bad weather, low-resolution images, and various environmental-impact factors. The proposed CNN is compared with other architectures, including GoogLeNet, AlexNet, DarkNet-53, ResNet-34, VGG-16, and MicronNet-BF. Experimental results confirm that the proposed CNN significantly improves recognition accuracy compared to existing models. In order to make our model interpretable, we utilize explainable AI (XAI) approaches, specifically Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), that can give insight into how the system comes to its decision. The evaluation of the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K) traffic sign dataset showed that the proposed method significantly outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we evaluated our model on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset to ensure generalization, demonstrating its ability to perform well in diverse traffic sign conditions. Design issues such as noise, contrast, blurring, and zoom effects were added to enhance performance in real applications. These verified results indicate both the strength and reliability of the CNN architecture proposed for TSR tasks and that it is a good option for integration into intelligent transportation systems (ITSs).