# Traffic Sign Recognition Using Local Vision Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06651 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06651/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09462/) (2023)
- [Next-ViT: Next Generation Vision Transformer for Efficient Deployment in Realistic Industrial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05501/) (2022)
- [Robust Transformer with Locality Inductive Bias and Feature Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11553/) (2023)
- [Dilated-UNet: A Fast and Accurate Medical Image Segmentation Approach using a Dilated Transformer and U-Net Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11450/) (2023)
- [Traffic Sign Classification Using Deep Inception Based Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02992/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Transformer for Traffic Sign Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06067/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Advancing Autonomous Vehicle Intelligence: Deep Learning and Multimodal LLM for Traffic Sign Recognition and Robust Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06313/) (2025)
- [Revolutionizing Traffic Sign Recognition: Unveiling the Potential of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19066/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Nighttime Traffic Sign Recognition with Illumination-Adaptive Detection and Semantic Attribute Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17183/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recognition of traffic signs is a crucial aspect of self-driving cars and driver assistance systems, and machine vision tasks such as traffic sign recognition have gained significant attention. CNNs have been frequently used in machine vision, but introducing vision transformers has provided an alternative approach to global feature learning. This paper proposes a new novel model that blends the advantages of both convolutional and transformer-based networks for traffic sign recognition. The proposed model includes convolutional blocks for capturing local correlations and transformer-based blocks for learning global dependencies. Additionally, a locality module is incorporated to enhance local perception. The performance of the suggested model is evaluated on the Persian Traffic Sign Dataset and German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark and compared with SOTA convolutional and transformer-based models. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the hybrid network with the locality module outperforms pure transformer-based models and some of the best convolutional networks in accuracy. Specifically, our proposed final model reached 99.66% accuracy in the German traffic sign recognition benchmark and 99.8% in the Persian traffic sign dataset, higher than the best convolutional models. Moreover, it outperforms existing CNNs and ViTs while maintaining fast inference speed. Consequently, the proposed model proves to be significantly faster and more suitable for real-world applications.