Performance Comparison of K-SVD, Discriminative K-SVD, and Approximate K-SVD Dictionary Learning Algorithms for Public Road Type Recognition

In today's world, having the ability to drive has become of significant importance, especially while traveling. As a consequence, the importance of studying road safety is rising. Hence, the importance of research in designing intelligent systems to aid drivers in providing comfort, security, and safety is also gaining much momentum in recent times. On the other hand, designing Dictionary learning (DL) algorithms in conjunction with sparse representation/coding has become a forerunner in machine learning based research problems in the current decade. Many such DL based sparse solutions have been effectively proposed for a variety of signal processing and image processing algorithms. In some of our earlier works, we have shown how various dictionary learning based algorithms and system solutions can be successfully developed for home automation and ambient assisted leaving problems. Taking our research efforts in DL algorithms further, in this work we show how DL algorithms can be effectively used to categorize four common road types: urban roads, highways, residential areas, and rural areas. The algorithms have been developed based on sensory signals acquired by a driver wearing smart glasses, while driving in those road conditions. The DL based system developed can help providing guidance to a driver during driving. Three prominent varieties of DL algorithms, called K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm, approximate K-SVD algorithm, and discriminative K-SVD algorithm, have been successfully implemented here for a benchmark, open dataset available for this problem and their suitable effectiveness has been investigated in detail. Although all the three varieties of K-SVD algorithms showed encouraging performances under different recognition problems, the discriminative K-SVD algorithm, employing orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm at its core for sparse coding purposes, emerged as the best overall performer.