Contrastive Learning-Driven Traffic Sign Perception: Multi-Modal Fusion of Text and Vision

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Main Authors: Lu, Qiang, Xiu, Waikit, Li, Xiying, Hu, Shenyu, Sun, Shengbo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lu, Qiang
Xiu, Waikit
Li, Xiying
Hu, Shenyu
Sun, Shengbo
author_facet Lu, Qiang
Xiu, Waikit
Li, Xiying
Hu, Shenyu
Sun, Shengbo
contents Traffic sign recognition, as a core component of autonomous driving perception systems, directly influences vehicle environmental awareness and driving safety. Current technologies face two significant challenges: first, the traffic sign dataset exhibits a pronounced long-tail distribution, resulting in a substantial decline in recognition performance of traditional convolutional networks when processing low-frequency and out-of-distribution classes; second, traffic signs in real-world scenarios are predominantly small targets with significant scale variations, making it difficult to extract multi-scale features.To overcome these issues, we propose a novel two-stage framework combining open-vocabulary detection and cross-modal learning. For traffic sign detection, our NanoVerse YOLO model integrates a reparameterizable vision-language path aggregation network (RepVL-PAN) and an SPD-Conv module to specifically enhance feature extraction for small, multi-scale targets. For traffic sign classification, we designed a Traffic Sign Recognition Multimodal Contrastive Learning model (TSR-MCL). By contrasting visual features from a Vision Transformer with semantic features from a rule-based BERT, TSR-MCL learns robust, frequency-independent representations, effectively mitigating class confusion caused by data imbalance. On the TT100K dataset, our method achieves a state-of-the-art 78.4% mAP in the long-tail detection task for all-class recognition. The model also obtains 91.8% accuracy and 88.9% recall, significantly outperforming mainstream algorithms and demonstrating superior accuracy and generalization in complex, open-world scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Learning-Driven Traffic Sign Perception: Multi-Modal Fusion of Text and Vision
Lu, Qiang
Xiu, Waikit
Li, Xiying
Hu, Shenyu
Sun, Shengbo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Traffic sign recognition, as a core component of autonomous driving perception systems, directly influences vehicle environmental awareness and driving safety. Current technologies face two significant challenges: first, the traffic sign dataset exhibits a pronounced long-tail distribution, resulting in a substantial decline in recognition performance of traditional convolutional networks when processing low-frequency and out-of-distribution classes; second, traffic signs in real-world scenarios are predominantly small targets with significant scale variations, making it difficult to extract multi-scale features.To overcome these issues, we propose a novel two-stage framework combining open-vocabulary detection and cross-modal learning. For traffic sign detection, our NanoVerse YOLO model integrates a reparameterizable vision-language path aggregation network (RepVL-PAN) and an SPD-Conv module to specifically enhance feature extraction for small, multi-scale targets. For traffic sign classification, we designed a Traffic Sign Recognition Multimodal Contrastive Learning model (TSR-MCL). By contrasting visual features from a Vision Transformer with semantic features from a rule-based BERT, TSR-MCL learns robust, frequency-independent representations, effectively mitigating class confusion caused by data imbalance. On the TT100K dataset, our method achieves a state-of-the-art 78.4% mAP in the long-tail detection task for all-class recognition. The model also obtains 91.8% accuracy and 88.9% recall, significantly outperforming mainstream algorithms and demonstrating superior accuracy and generalization in complex, open-world scenarios.
title Contrastive Learning-Driven Traffic Sign Perception: Multi-Modal Fusion of Text and Vision
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23331