DPRSMR: Deep Learning-based Persian Road Surface Marking Recognition

Persian Road Surface Markings (PRSMs) recognition is a prerequisite for future intelligent vehicles in Iran. First, the existence of Persian texts on the Road Surface Markings (RSMs) makes it challenging. Second, the RSM could appear on the road with different qualities, such as poor, fair, and excellent quality. Since the type of poor-quality RSM is variable from one province to another (i.e., varying road structure and scene complexity), it is a very essential and challenging task to recognize unforeseen poor-quality RSMs. Third, almost all existed datasets have imbalanced classes that affect the accuracy of the recognition problem. To address the first challenge, the proposed Persian Road Surface Recognizer (PRSR) approach hierarchically separates the texts and symbols before recognition. To this end, the Symbol Text Separator Network (STS-Net) is proposed. Consequently, the proposed Text Recognizer Network (TR-Net) and Symbol Recognizer Network (SR-Net) respectively recognize the text and symbol. To investigate the second challenge, we introduce two different scenario. Scenario A: Conventional random splitting training and testing data. Scenario B: Since the PRSM dataset include few images of different distance from each scene of RSM, it is highly probable that at least one of these images appear in the training set, making the recognition process easy. Since in any province of Iran, we may see a new type of poor quality RSM, which is unforeseen before (in training set), we design a realistic and challengeable scenario B in which the network is trained using excellent and fair quality RSMs and tested on poor quality ones. Besides, we propose to use the data augmentation technique to overcome the class imbalanced data challenge. The proposed approach achieves reliable performance (precision of 73.37% for scenario B) on the PRSM dataset . It significantly improves the recognition accuracy up to 15% in different scenarios. Since the PRSMs include both Persian texts (with different styles) and symbols, prior to recognition process, separating the text and symbol by a proposed STS-Net could increase the recognition rate. Deploying new powerful networks and investigating new techniques to deal with class imbalanced data in the recognition problem of the PRSM dataset as well as data augmentation would be an interesting future work.