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Journal of ZheJiang University (Engineering Science)  2026, Vol. 60 Issue (9): 1881-1889    DOI: 10.3785/j.issn.1008-973X.2026.09.005
    
Text detection of highway traffic sign based on improved EAST
Jiuyuan HUO(),Hao JIANG,Chen CHANG
School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou 730070, China
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Abstract  

A traffic sign text detection algorithm (efficient traffic sign text detection, ETST) based on the efficient and accurate text detection (EAST) algorithm was proposed in order to address the issue of poor accuracy and stability in traffic sign text detection in highway scenarios. The detection performance of highway traffic sign text was improved by introducing three types of modules. Potential marker regions in an image can be quickly screened by utilizing a traditional marker pre-detection module based on color threshold segmentation and shape analysis. The recognition ability of the proposed algorithm for text at different scales was improved by integrating a multi-scale attention enhancement module. An improved parallel patch-aware attention module (NPPA) was proposed to enhance the ability of the proposed algorithm to perceive and represent local structural features. ETST effectively combined low-level texture cues with high-level semantic information by fusing multi-level feature maps in order to enhance discrimination of challenging text instances. Experiments on datasets such as ICDAR2015, CCTSDB and Total-Text demonstrated that ETST outperformed existing algorithms in key metrics such as accuracy, recall and F1 score, while achieving a processing speed of over 10 frames per second. Then the requirement of near real-time application was satisfied, and decent detection accuracy and computational efficiency were confirmed.



Key wordstraffic sign text detection      traffic sign text detection algorithm      multi-scale attention mechanism      small target text detection      parallel patch attention module      multi-scale feature extraction     
Received: 23 September 2025      Published: 20 July 2026
CLC:  TP 391  
Fund:  国家自然科学基金资助项目(62262038);甘肃省重点研发计划资助项目(25YFGA045).
Cite this article:

Jiuyuan HUO,Hao JIANG,Chen CHANG. Text detection of highway traffic sign based on improved EAST. Journal of ZheJiang University (Engineering Science), 2026, 60(9): 1881-1889.

URL:

https://www.zjujournals.com/eng/10.3785/j.issn.1008-973X.2026.09.005     OR     https://www.zjujournals.com/eng/Y2026/V60/I9/1881


基于改进EAST的高速公路交通标识文本检测

针对高速公路场景中交通标识文本检测精度与稳定性较差的问题,提出基于高效准确文字检测(EAST)算法思路的交通标识文本检测算法(ETST). 该算法通过引入3类模块,提升高速公路交通标识文本的检测性能. 利用基于颜色阈值分割与形状分析的传统标识预检测模块,快速筛选图像中的潜在标识区域. 融合多尺度注意力增强模块,增强提出算法对不同尺度文本的识别能力. 提出改进型并行补丁感知注意力模块(NPPA),强化所提算法对局部结构特征的感知与表达能力. 通过对多尺度特征图的联合融合,ETST能够有效整合底层纹理与高层语义信息,提升小尺寸与模糊文本的检测效果. 在ICDAR2015、CCTSDB、Total-Text等数据集上的实验证明,ETST在准确率、召回率及F1分数等核心指标上均优于现有算法,对图片的处理速度大于10帧/s,满足准实时应用需求,具有较高的检测精度与计算效率.


关键词: 交通标识文本检测,  交通标识文本检测算法,  多尺度注意力机制,  小目标文本检测,  并行补丁感知模块,  多尺度特征提取 
Fig.1 Structure of proposed ETST algorithm
Fig.2 RGB2HSV conversion result
Fig.3 Structure of EMA module
Fig.4 Structure of nested parallelized patch-aware module
方法ICDAR2015Total-text
P/%R/%F1/%v/(帧·s?1)P/%R/%F1/%v/(帧·s?1)
EAST83.278.680.813.280.976.278.511.6
DBNet84.082.783.322.081.279.980.620.3
SegLink86.979.583.05.986.182.684.44.9
PSENet84.384.584.48.087.682.384.87.3
ETST(本文算法)87.483.185.112.486.584.985.710.3
Tab.1 Detection result of different algorithms on ICDAR2015 and Total-text dataset
方法CCTSDBGS highway sign
P/%R/%mAP@0.5 /%v/(帧·s?1)P/%R/%mAP@0.5 /%v/(帧·s?1)
YOLOv587.384.586.158.284.982.083.752.4
YOLOv889.586.288.365.187.884.686.560.3
Faster R-CNN85.182.784.49.282.780.281.98.7
RetinaNet86.083.285.032.584.280.982.428.7
ETST(本文算法)88.687.989.218.591.188.491.816.8
Tab.2 Detection result of different algorithms on CCTSDB and GS highway sign dataset
方法P/%R/%F1/%v/(帧·s?1)
YOLOv580.675.477.947.5
YOLOv884.979.281.954.6
Faster R-CNN77.273.175.16.3
RetinaNet79.874.877.224.7
ETST(本文算法)86.381.483.812.5
Tab.3 Detection result of different algorithms on GS highway sign small target dataset
方法EMANPPALossP/%R/%F1/%
M176.176.876.5
M280.479.680
M384.280.582.1
M486.381.283.7
M585.280.782.8
M688.283.585.8
Tab.4 Result of ablation experiment on ETST module
方法P/%R/%F1/%
基础算法EAST76.176.876.5
本文算法(PPA)82.778.880.7
本文算法(PPA1)83.279.581.3
本文算法(NPPA)84.280.582.1
Tab.5 Result of ablation experiment of nested parallelized patch-aware module
Fig.5 Partial visualization result of general text detector and proposed algorithm
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