A Comparative Study of CNN, SSD and VGG16 for Robust Traffic Sign Recognition

Authors

  • Hasan Hamad Ministry of education Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.65204/djes.v3i2.711

Keywords:

Traffic light , Traffic jam, Deep learning, Transfer learning

Abstract

These techniques do everything in their power to get it right to avoid hazardous mistakes. The downside, they can also be too slow for everyday driving, where the decisions need to happen within a blink of an eye. Focus on Speed: Such methods run very fast. The downside, they may not be consistent enough at challenging times, such as reading signs far away, under darkness, or at bad weather. This thesis overcomes these challenges through combining deep learning-a sophisticated type of AI-with an intelligent image pre-processing technique. We have chosen deep learning because it has been proven to perform very well in a wide range of analysis task, even outperforming or matching human capabilities in certain visual tasks. In our tests, we implemented different deep learning models-CNN, SSD, and VGG16-based on the strengths and weaknesses of our image dataset. Our experience showed that the simplest CNN model was not fit for this purpose. On the other hand, the VGG16 model performed better. It was capable of recognizing traffic signs reasonably well, including under complex situations such as variable weather conditions or lighting, or when the traffic signs were far away. The best performing model is VGG16 with 91% testing accuracy. 

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Published

2026-06-17