Vehicle Logo Recognition with Small Sample Problem in Complex Scene Based on Data Augmentation

Automatic identification for vehicles is an important topic in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and the vehicle logo is one of the most important characteristics of a vehicle. Therefore, vehicle logo detection and recognition are important research topics. Because of the problems that the area of a vehicle logo is too small to be detected and the dataset is too small to train for complex scenes, considering the speed of recognition and the robustness to complex scenes, we use deep learning methods which are based on data optimization for vehicle logo in complex scenes. We propose three augmentation strategies for vehicle logo data: cross-sliding segmentation method, small frame method, and Gaussian Distribution Segmentation method. For the problem of small sample size, we use cross-sliding segmentation method, which can effectively increase the amount of data without changing the aspect ratio of the original vehicle logo image. To expand the area of the logos in the images, we develop the small frame method which improves the detection results of the small area vehicle logos. In order to enrich the position diversity of vehicle logo in the image, we propose Gaussian Distribution Segmentation method, and the result shows that this method is very effective. The F1 value of our method in the YOLO framework is 0.7765, and the precision is greatly improved to 0.9295. In the Faster R-CNN framework, the F1 value of our method is 0.7799, which is also better than before. The results of experiments show that the above optimization methods can better represent the features of the vehicle logos than the traditional method, and the experimental results have been improved.