Traffic Sign Image Recognition Using Gabor

Wavelet and Principle Component Analysis

Immawan Wicaksono
Hendra Kusuma Tri Arief Sardjono
Department of Electrical Engineering
Department of Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering
Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Faculty of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Institute Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember
Institute Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember Institute Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember
Surabaya, Indonesia
Surabaya, Indonesia Surabaya, Indonesia
immwnw@ee.its.ac.id
hendraks@ee.its.ac.id sardjono@elect-eng.its.ac.id

Abstract- The image recognition system of traffic signs is

one of the important elements needed by autonomous vehicles,
which also these signs are a guide for autonomous vehicles. In
this paper we propose a traffic signs image recognition by
implementing Gabor wavelet feature extraction. The images of
traffic signs will be captured by cameras. These images will
then be processed for recognition. Where in the process the
features of the traffic sign images will be extracted so that the
identifier for each traffic sign is obtained. We use 8
orientations and 5 scales Gabor bank and PCA in recognition
process to get a good accuracy as well as efficiency. Easiness
and high accuracy was the avantages from proposed Gabor
method. This method as seen from the experimental results
demonstrate fair reasonable in terms of preciseness, with
90.55% overall average recognition rate are obtained for the
data of 100 traffic sign images.
Keywords— traffic sign, feature extraction, gabor wavelet
component.
I. INTRODUCTION
Traffic signs are one of the road equipment in the form
of symbols, letters, numbers, sentences and its combinations
such as warnings, prohibitions, orders or directions for road
users. By recognizing traffic signs, the vehicle is expected
to provide information to the driver. In addition, automotive
manufacturers are currently aggressively developing
autonomous vehicles in which the detection and
introduction of digital images has a very important role for
driver assistance systems, and autonomous driving systems.
The image recognition system of traffic signs is one of the
important elements needed by the autonomous vehicle,
where these signs are also a guide for autonomous vehicles
during trips on the road.
This research aims to develop a traffic signs recognition
system with a high degree of accuracy in recognizing traffic
sign even when they are color degradation, dirty and various
forms of traffic signs. We used Gabor wavelet as a feature
extraction method in this research. when used in face
recognition biometric recognition system Gabor wavelet has
been proven to have excellent performance[1]. Gabor
wavelet is a powerful tool for representing complex texture
features so this method intended to be precise and accurate
when applied to traffic signs recognition system. The
recognition is done by using 3 (three) shape of traffic sign
such as rhombus, round and square In this research.
II. RELATED WORKS
Several works have been conducted to recognize traffic
sign. Sridevi et al [2] used the red mask technique to detect
traffic signs that looking red color in the image because all
traffic signs in India are red and NCC (Normalized Cross-
Correlation) as a recognition system. The use of NCC shows
a match of 90% for a background similar to a database, and
has decreased to 75% when the background taken is
different from the database. Tong Guofeng et all [3] used
SVM (Support Vector Machine) HOG (Histogram of
Oriented Gradient) features and CNN (Convolutional Neural
Network). The HOG feature technique calculates the
appearance of gradient orientations in localized images and
SVM is an effective classifier. Hengliang Luo et all [3] used
multi-task convolutional neural network, which is trained
with a large amount of data and Chunsheng Liu et all [4]
used a novel region-of-interest (ROI) extraction method
called the high-contrast region extraction (HCRE), the split-
flow cascade tree detector (SFC-tree detector), and a rapid
occlusion-robust traffic sign classification method based on
the extended sparse representation classification (ESRC).
III. PROPOSED FRAMEWORK
The traffic sign recognition system that we proposed has
several details that will be explained in this section, i.e.
PCA, Gabor wavelet features then nearest neighbor
recognition. The processing’s steps are shown in figure 1.
Fig.1: The Block Diagram of traffic sign Recognition System
Note: after the picture of the traffic sign is taken, all traffic
sign images are cropped and resized to 200x200 pixels,
and converted to grayscale images..
3.1 Gabor Filter Construction
The first step of using gabor wavelet is Gabor filter
construction. Gabor wavelet is very usefull tool as localize
characteristics in both frequency and spatial domain analysis
in image analysis and machine vision, [1][5][6][7]. The
equation of 2D Gabor filters can be defined as [8][9],
(1)
, , ,
.

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 The scale and orientation of the Gabor wavelet filters
represented respectively by u and ν. The part between the
Gaussian envelope’s size and centre frequency the are
detemined by the symbol κ and η respectively. The
parameters values of κ and η are generally set to κ = η =√2
fmax that indicates the maximum frequency of the filters and
usually is set to fmax = 0.25. mostly image recognition
researchs use eight orientations, v ϵ {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
and five scales, u ϵ {0, 1, 2, 3, 4} , which causes a Gabor
filter bank of 40 filters [9][10].
Fig. 2. The real part of Gabor Wavelets bank with 5
frequencies and 8 orientations
3.2 Gabor Wavelet Features
After we construct gabor filter, next step is make Gabor
wavelet features. By filtering an image R(x,y) using gabor
filter that we construct with various scales and orientations
, we can received Gabor wavelet features. The
process of extracting features can be mathematically
expressed as,
Where * stands for the convolution operator and
stands for the complex output which can be broke down into
its imaginary parts and real
way:
and
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Fig. 3. The output of filtering round traffic sign with the
whole of 40 Gabor filters
3.3 Principal component analysis
The total dimensions of Gabor Wavelet Features
Vector sets are considerable, and directly use the vectors
would lead to get various kinds of dimensional problem.
That problem can be prevented by using Subspace LDA as a
dimensionality reduction techniques. LDA provides a
mapping process that generate the within-class scatter small
and the between class scatter large. Through PCA this
process has shown could improve classification
achievement. On the other hand, it depends on a large
training sample set to get good results. To deal analogous
problems, Zhao et al [9] before performing LDA, he using
PCA to decrease feature size.
PCA aims to get a set of projection vectors that
project into a RPCA - dimensional feature space from the
original R-dimensional image space, in which RPCA << R. In
PCA, the Ɲ images of the training set are merged to Ɲ
column vectors xi of length P accord to the number of
pixels. If the total scatter is set by the P x P and mean is ,
i.e.
(2)
(4)
A set of eigenvectors can be found from PCA, i.e. {𝐰𝟏,
𝐰𝟐,…, 𝐰𝐃𝐏𝐂𝐀} of 𝑆𝑇, was used to construct the projection
matrix 𝑊𝑃𝐶𝐴 = [𝐰𝟏, 𝐰𝟐, …, 𝐰𝐃𝐏𝐂𝐀] pursuant to the 𝐷𝑃𝐶𝐴
in this largest eigenvalues. As a result of that, vectors of new
feature we get , i.e.
(5)
(3) The purpose of LDA is to find the best set of separate
vectors that maps a M𝐿𝐷𝐴-dimensional feature domain from
the initial M-dimensional image domain (M𝐿𝐷𝐴≪M ) such as
that images of the same class are more closed and images
from various classes are more separated. A matrix projector
W is the objective of LDA, this matrix extend the result of
Sb and Sw [9],
(6)
Sw and Sb are the within-class scatter and between-class
distribute respectively. given Nc be the number of samples
267 in class c and let a C class patterns, a set of M training
patterns from the C class can be assigned as
. The Sw first traffic sign image set, was used for training and
and Sb from a training set can be figured as : enrollment, and the second set were used for testing.
The classification tests were achieved by Subspace
(7) LDA used several numbers of eigenvectors. The recognition
was achieved using a cosine - based distance measure and a
(8) NN classifier, which is express as,

variable µc is the mean for the class c µ is the mean of all
the training set, µ is the mean of all the training set. As can
be seen in [10] that from the eigenvectors of Sw-1Sb, the
matrix projector W can be projected. Let we say WPCA is the
matrix projector from the PCA subspace of initial image
domain, WLDA (LDA matrix projector) is developed from the
eigenvectors of . The
final projection matrix W subspace LDA is show at the
equation 9,
(9)
(11)
we used 8 orientations (v = 8) and 5, 4, and 3 filter scales
(u=5, 4, 3) to construct The Gabor Feature,.
1.3 Experiment Result
Experiment results from the traffic sign images
recognition can be seen on figures 5, 6 and 7.
Fig. 5 The Experimental Result Using 5 Scales and 8
Orientations Gabor Wavelet

therefore a smaller traffic sign feature vector Fig. 6 The Experimental Result Of Using 4 Scales 8
are provided as, Orientations Gabor Wavelet

(10)

IV. Experimental Results And Discussion

To show the performance of our suggestion method,
we used our traffic sign image datasets.

4.1 Traffic sign image database

The traffic sign database consists of 100 images for 20
signs (5 images for each sign). The dimension of each image
is 200x200. Every specific traffic sign image is shown on
fig. 4.

Fig. 4. Sample traffic sign dataset

4.2 Experiment Setting

First step all traffic sign images were converted to
grayscale and then cropped to a size of 200 × 200 pixels to
make sure all those Traffic sign images have same size.
Next step is all the images were separated into two sets. The

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 [3] T. Guofeng, C. Huairong and L. Yong, "Traffic Sign Recognition
Based on SVM And Convolutional Neural Network," 12th IEEE
Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, pp. 2066-
2071, 2017.
[4] H. Luo, Y. Yang, B. Tong, F. Wu and B. Fan, "Traffic Sign
Recognition Using a Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Network,"
IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, vol. 19, pp. 1100 - 1111,
2017.
[5] L. C and W. H., "Gabor Feature Based Classification Using the
Enhanced Fisher Linear Discriminant Model for Face Recognition,"
IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, vol. 11, pp. 467-476, 2002.
[6] L. Huang, A. Shimizu and H. Kobatake, "Classification-Based Face
Detection Using Gabor Filter Features," 5th IEEE International
Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, pp. 397-402,
2004.
Fig. 7 The Experimental Result Of Using 3 Scales 8 [7] V. Kyrki, J. Kamarainen and H. Kalviainen, "Simple Gabor feature
space for invariant object recognition," Pattern Recognition Letters,
Orientations Gabor Wavelet vol. 25, pp. 310-317, 2005.
[8] V. Struc and N. and Pavesic, "From Gabor Magnitude to Gabor Phase
Features: Tackling the Problem of Face Recognition under Severe
4.4 Discussion Illumination Changes," in Face Recognition, intechopen online books,
The Traffic sign image recognition results obtained 2010.
from applying Gabor wavelet features extractors combined [9] H. Kusuma, Wirawan and A. Soeprijanto, "Face Recognition Against
with PCA has shown the good recognition performance on Varying Lighting Conditions Using Oriented PCI Features," Journal
traffic sign image database. of Theoretical & Applied Information Technology, p. 88, 2016.
[10] C. Wei-lun, "Gabor Wavelet Transform and Its Application,"
R98942073.
V. Conclusions
The potential method for traffic sign image
recognition have been proposed in this paper. Gabor
wavelet is used for extracting traffic sign features. The PCA
used to reduce matrix data that we process, for classification
all those feature vectors we used Subspace LDA. 24 Gabor
filters ( 3 scales, 8 orientations) that we used show the best
traffic sign image recognition performance,. The usefullness
of the traffic sign recognition method was evaluated on our
private dataset, i.e. traffic sign image dataset. As shown
from the experimental results, our proposed approach
demonstrates an acceptable traffic sign recognition
achievement, particularly to assure an excellent recognition
performance in the presence of different traffic sign shape.
Our method can reach good recognition accuracies which
are, 95%, 90%, 95% Using 8 Orientations And 5 Scales
Gabor Wavelet; 85%, 75%, 75% Using 8 Orientations And
4 Scales Gabor Wavelet; 71%, 55%, 60% Using 8
Orientations And 3 Scales Gabor Wavelet. The data shows
that the best results are obtained using Gabor wavelet with 8
orientations and 5 scales without reducing any number of
eigenvectors. side effects from without this reduction is a
large database but has the best recognition.

REFERENCES

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Sign Recognition System Using Fast Normalized Cross Correlation
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