Ethiopian Traffic Sign Recognition Using Customized Convolutional Neural Networks and Transfer Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intelligent transportation systems rely greatly on their capacity to identify and recognize traffic signs. Traffic signs are important for modern transportation systems because they keep roads safe and help drivers, especially in areas like Ethiopia where sign designs are unique and diversified. In this study, we presented a convolutional neural network (CNN)–based model for Ethiopian traffic sign recognition (ETSR) purposes. We applied the transfer learning technique to fine‐tune the pretrained models, namely, MobileNet, VGG16, and ResNet50. Both training and model hyperparameters are fine‐tuned, and the 11,000 Ethiopian traffic sign images, which have 156 unique signs, are leveraged to build the new models. Optimizer, batch size, learning rate, and epoch are among the tuned training hyperparameters. All convolutional bases (learning layers) are trained using new weights. We built the fully connected layer of each model from two batch normalization layers and two dense layers. The output layer of the models has 156 units (neurons) with a softmax activation layer. The performances of newly developed models are rigorously compared with those of the base (pretrained) models. The best model was also selected after rigorous experiments. Based on the experiment, we achieved testing accuracy of 97.91%, 93.45%, and 80.18% for fine‐tuned VGG16, MobileNet, and ResNet50, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".