# Traffic Sign Recognition for Autonomous Driving Using Branched YOLOv2 and Geometric Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22060/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

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

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [Fast unsupervised Bayesian image segmentation with adaptive spatial regularisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01400/) (2015)
- [Localized Traffic Sign Detection with Multi-scale Deconvolution Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10428/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic sign recognition (TSR) is an important perception task for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems, where a system must both localize traffic signs and determine their semantic classes efficiently. This work presents a TSR system based on YOLOv2 for simultaneous detection and classification. Two complementary modifications are studied. First, YOLOv2 is extended with intermediate prediction layers, forming a branched architecture that can terminate inference early for easy cases and reduce computation time. Both whole-image and cell-wise branching strategies are investigated. Second, geometric information is introduced to reduce classification errors between visually similar signs. An unsupervised Bayesian image-segmentation method produces binary representations that are compared with class-specific geometric templates inside YOLOv2 bounding boxes. This information is used either during inference or as an additional signal during training. A dedicated dataset is constructed by combining GTSDB and GTSRB samples using seamless cloning and controlled image transformations. Experiments cover ten traffic-sign classes, with 3,000 training and 300 test samples. The selected branched architecture reports 0.647 s runtime and 0.680 mAP, compared with 0.6607 s and 0.680 mAP for baseline YOLOv2. Geometric verification during inference increases mAP to 0.713, while the geometric-feature training variant achieves 0.697 mAP with a reported runtime of 0.6608 s.