Emergency vehicles classification for traffic signal system using optimized transfer DenseNet201 model

Abstract

As a result of the rapid growth of the world population, traffic signaling systems for monitoring and controlling the roads have turned to be an important issue facing humanity. To effectively overcome this problem, an accurate method for congestion reduction on the roads should be used which has a direct relation between the population and the cars’ usage. Various approaches derived from deep and transfer learning have been investigated in this context. This research implemented an optimized transfer learning approach for densely connected convolutional neural network (DenseNet201) models for multiple classifications (non-emergency cars, ambulance, police, and firefighter). Due to the non-availability of public datasets, a customized dataset has been created. This paper aims to improve the performance accuracy of vehicle classification using certain preprocessing algorithms on the input images and testing various optimization methods. The performance accuracy of the proposed model is evaluated using k-folds cross-validation 20:80 for the test and training, respectively. The metrics which are used for comparison with other deep learning techniques are based on exactness, recall, accuracy and F1-score. Test outcomes specify that the proposed transfer model-based optimization outperforms alternative deep learning algorithms regarding vehicle accuracy in classifying and reaches 98.6%.