Among the reasons for traffic accidents, distractions are the most common. Although there are many traffic signs on the road that contribute to safety, variable message signs (VMSs) require special attention, which is transformed into distraction. ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) devices are advanced systems that perceive the environment and provide assistance to the driver for his comfort or safety. This project aims to develop a prototype of a VMS (variable message sign) reading system using machine learning techniques, which are still not used, especially in this aspect. The assistant consists of two parts: a first one that recognizes the signal on the street and another one that extracts its text and transforms it into speech. For the first one, a set of images were labeled in PASCAL VOC format by manual annotations, scraping and data augmentation. With this dataset, the VMS recognition model was trained, a RetinaNet based off of ResNet50 pretrained on the dataset COCO. Firstly, in the reading process, the images were preprocessed and binarized to achieve the best possible quality. Finally, the extraction was done by the Tesseract OCR model in its 4.0 version, and the speech was done by the cloud service of IBM Watson Text to Speech.

This publication presents a dataset of Spanish roundabouts aerial images taken from a UAV, along with annotations in PASCAL VOC XML files that indicate the position of vehicles within them. Additionally, a CSV file is attached containing information related to the location and characteristics of the captured roundabouts. This work details the process followed to obtain them: image capture, processing, and labeling. The dataset consists of 985,260 total instances: 947,400 cars, 19,596 cycles, 2262 trucks, 7008 buses, and 2208 empty roundabouts in 61,896 1920 × 1080 px JPG images. These are divided into 15,474 extracted images from 8 roundabouts with different traffic flows and 46,422 images created using data augmentation techniques. The purpose of this dataset is to help research into computer vision on the road, as such labeled images are not abundant. It can be used to train supervised learning models, such as convolutional neural networks, which are very popular in object detection.

This publication presents a dataset consisting of Spanish road images taken from inside a vehicle, as well as annotations in XML files in PASCAL VOC format that indicate the location of Variable Message Signals within them. Additionally, a CSV file is attached with information regarding the geographic position, the folder where the image is located and the text in Spanish. This can be used to train supervised learning computer vision algorithms such as convolutional neural networks. Throughout this work, the process followed to obtain the dataset, image acquisition and labeling and its specifications are detailed. The dataset constitutes 1216 instances, 888 positives and 328 negatives, in 1152 jpg images with a resolution of 1280 × 720 pixels. These are divided into 756 real images and 756 images created from the data-augmentation technique. The purpose of this dataset is to help in road computer vision research since there is not one specifically for VMSs.