Conditional transfer with dense residual attention: synthesizing traffic signs from street-view imagery

Object detection and classification of traffic signs in street-view imagery is an essential element for asset management, map making and autonomous driving. However, some traffic signs occur rarely and consequently, they are difficult to recognize automatically. To improve the detection and classification rates, we propose to generate images of traffic signs, which are then used to train a detector/classifier. In this research, we present an end-to-end framework that generates a realistic image of a traffic sign from a given image of a traffic sign and a pictogram of the target class. We propose a residual attention mechanism with dense concatenation called Dense Residual Attention, that preserves the background information while transferring the object information. We also propose to utilize multi-scale discriminators, so that the smaller scales of the output guide the higher resolution output. We have performed detection and classification tests across a large number of traffic sign classes, by training the detector using the combination of real and generated data. The newly trained model reduces the number of false positives by 1.2 - 1.5% at 99% recall in the detection tests and an absolute improvement of 4.65% (top-l accuracy) in the classification tests.