Traffic signs detection and prohibitor signs recognition in Morocco road scene

Traffic sign detection is a crucial aspect of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for academic research and the automotive industry. seeing that accurate and timely detection of traffic signs (TS) is essential for ensuring the safety of driving. However, TS detection methods encounter challenges like slow detection speed and a lack of robustness in complex environments. This paper suggests addressing these limitations by proposing the use of the you only look one version 7 (YOLOv7) network to detect and recognize TS in road scenes. Furthermore, the k-means++ algorithm is used to acquire anchor boxes. Additionally, a tiny version of YOLOv7 is used to take advantage of its real-time and low model size, which are required for real-time hardware implementation. So, we conducted an experiment using our proprietary Morocco dataset. According to the experimental results, YOLOv7 achieves 85% in terms of mean average precision (mAP) at 0.5 for all classes. And YOLOv7-tiny obtains 90% in the same term. Afterward, a recognition system for the prohibitive class using the convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained and integrated inside the YOLOv7 algorithm; its model achieves an accuracy of 99%, which leads to a good specification of the prohibitive sign meaning.