Visualization of Traffic Sign Related Rules Used in Road Environment-type Detection

A heuristic rule-based approach was proposed in a recent paper for the detection of the urban road environment-type (RET), such as downtown, residential area, and business/industrial area, that characterizes the road environment around an ego-car. The RET detection approach takes into account the relevant traffic signs (TSs) that are visible from the ego-car. It is assumed that the TS data, namely the type and the location of each detected TS along the route, is made available for the purpose by an on-board TS recognition system. The continually updated TS data is aggregated and evaluated in a multi-scale manner by the RET detection system. In the present paper, the heuristic rules – employed within the mentioned system – that handle the competition situations arising between the RET-candidates selected for and representing the various distance-scales are visualized in a vividly descriptive manner. The visualization of the rules makes the decision process easier to understand, furthermore, it facilitates the re-use, the adaptation and the extension of the rule-set for other road-related applications that rely on TS and possibly on other road-related data. A summary of the RET detection results from the mentioned paper is included herein to make the paper self-contained.