Relevant Traffic Light Localization via Deep Regression

Artificial intelligence advances have an important role on self-driving cars development, such as assisting the recognition of traffic lights. However, when relying on images of the scene alone, little progress was observed on selecting the traffic lights defining guidance to the car. Common detection approaches rely on additional high-level decision-making process to select a relevant traffic light. This work address the problem by proposing a deep regression system with an outliers resilient loss to predict the coordinates of a relevant traffic light in the image plane. The prediction can be used as a high-level decision-maker or as an assistant to a cheaper classifier to work on a region of interest. Results for European scenes show success in about 88% of the cases.