Semi-Supervised Traffic Sign Detection with Dynamic Pseudo-Label Selection and Gated Feature Fusion-Based Proposal Refinement

Accurate traffic sign detection is important for the safety of autonomous driving systems. However, fully supervised methods require a large amount of manual annotation, which is cost-prohibitive and time-consuming. Semi-supervised methods employ a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to train the models, hence largely reducing the annotation costs. However, these methods have the following challenges: (1) with an imbalanced long-tail class distribution of traffic signs, they tend to achieve poor performance on tail classes; (2) they often fail to detect small traffic signs. To solve these issues, we propose a Semi-Supervised Traffic Sign Detection method with Dynamic Pseudo-Label Selection and Gated Feature Fusion-based Proposal Refinement. Firstly, we design a Class Distribution-based Dynamic Pseudo-Label Selection module (CD-DPLS) to select pseudo-labels for different classes based on the class distribution information, which reduces the tendency to select more pseudo-labels from head classes instead of tail classes, thereby improving the tail class detection performance. Secondly, we employ a Gated Feature Fusion-based Proposal Refinement strategy (GFF-PR) to refine detection proposals by fusing different-scale features with a gating mechanism, which facilitates the detection of small traffic signs. In addition, we use an Adaptive-Weight Focal Loss (AWFL), with which the weight of each pseudo-label is determined by the ratio between its classification confidence and the corresponding class-specific classification-confidence threshold. Experiments on traffic sign datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches, with mAP50 scores of 10.8% and 34.9% using only 1% and 10% labeled data, respectively.