Generative modeling of spatio-temporal traffic sign trajectories

We consider the task of automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs in video. We show that successful off-the-shelf detection (Viola-Jones) and classification (SVM) systems yield unsatisfactory results. Our main concern are high false positive detection rates which occur due to sparseness of the traffic signs in videos. We address the problem by enforcing spatio-temporal consistency of the detections corresponding to a distinct sign in video. We also propose a generative model of the traffic sign motion in the image plane, which is obtained by clustering the trajectories filtered by an appropriate procedure. The contextual information recovered by the proposed model will be employed in our future research on recognizing traffic signs in video.