Traffic sign detection is critical for autonomous driving technology. However, accurately detecting traffic signs in complex traffic environments remains challenge despite the widespread use of one‐stage detection algorithms known for their real‐time processing capabilities. In this paper, the authors propose a traffic sign detection method based on YOLO v8. Specifically, this study introduces the Space‐to‐Depth (SPD) module to address missed detections caused by multi‐scale variations of traffic signs in traffic scenes. The SPD module compresses spatial information into depth channels, expanding the receptive field and enhancing the detection capabilities for objects of varying sizes. Furthermore, to address missed detections caused by complex backgrounds such as trees, this paper employs the Select Kernel attention mechanism. This mechanism enables the model to dynamically adjust its focus and more effectively concentrate on key features. Additionally, considering the uneven distribution of training data, the authors adopted the WIoUv3 loss function, which optimizes loss calculation through a weighted approach, thereby improving the model's detection performance across various sizes and frequencies of instances. The proposed methods were validated on the CCTSDB and TT100K datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ method achieves substantial improvements of 3.2% and 5.1% on the mAP50 metric compared to YOLOv8s, while maintaining high detection speed, significantly enhancing the overall performance of the detection system. The code for this paper is located at https://github.com/dusongjie/TSD‐YOLO‐Small‐Traffic‐Sign‐Detection‐Based‐on‐Improved‐YOLO‐v8

Traffic sign detection is an important component of autonomous vehicles. There is still a mismatch problem between the existing detection algorithm and its practical application in real traffic scenes, which is mainly due to the detection accuracy and data acquisition. To tackle this problem, this study proposed an improved sparse R-CNN that integrates coordinate attention block with ResNeSt and builds a feature pyramid to modify the backbone, which enables the extracted features to focus on important information, and improves the detection accuracy. In order to obtain more diverse data, the augmentation method used is specifically designed for complex traffic scenarios, and we also present a traffic sign dataset in this study. For on-road autonomous vehicles, we designed two modules, self-adaption augmentation (SAA) and detection time augmentation (DTA), to improve the robustness of the detection algorithm. The evaluations on traffic sign datasets and on-road testing demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Object detection plays a vital role in autonomous driving systems, and the accurate detection of surrounding objects can ensure the safe driving of vehicles. This paper proposes a category-assisted transformer object detector called DetectFormer for autonomous driving. The proposed object detector can achieve better accuracy compared with the baseline. Specifically, ClassDecoder is assisted by proposal categories and global information from the Global Extract Encoder (GEE) to improve the category sensitivity and detection performance. This fits the distribution of object categories in specific scene backgrounds and the connection between objects and the image context. Data augmentation is used to improve robustness and attention mechanism added in backbone network to extract channel-wise spatial features and direction information. The results obtained by benchmark experiment reveal that the proposed method can achieve higher real-time detection performance in traffic scenes compared with RetinaNet and FCOS. The proposed method achieved a detection performance of 97.6% and 91.4% in AP50 and AP75 on the BCTSDB dataset, respectively.