Two-tier self-organizing visual model for road sign recognition

This paper attempts to model human brain's cognitive process at the primary visual cortex to comprehend road sign. The cortical maps in visual cortex have been widely focused in recent research. We propose a visual model that locates road sign in an image and identifies the localized road sign. Gabor wavelets are used to encode visual information and extract features. Self-organizing maps are used to cluster and classify the road sign images. We evaluate the system with various test sets. The experimental results show encouraging recognition hit rates. There are quite a number of literatures [1]-[13] introducing different approaches to classify road sign, but none has adopted unsupervised approach. This work makes use of two-tier topological maps to recognize road signs. First-tier map, called detecting map, filters out non-road sign images and regions. Second-tier map, called recognizing map, classifies a road sign into appropriate class.