Real‐time CVSA decals recognition system using deep convolutional neural network architectures

Abstract

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) aims to achieve uniformity, compatibility and reciprocity of commercial motor vehicle inspections and enforcement by certified inspectors dedicated to driver and vehicle safety. Commercial vehicles that pass a CVSA inspection are eligible for a decal representing a commitment to safety. In this work, we propose a two-step automatic CVSA decal recognition system using deep convolutional neural network architectures. The first step localizes a vehicle's windshield and the CVSA decal within, and classifies the decal colour. The CVSA decal is cropped and used as input to the second stage, which localizes and classifies a digit and the corner-cut of a CVSA decal. With the corner cut, colour, and digit, the system can determine the decal's date of issue. We use as our baseline the MobileDet architecture, customizing the backbone to our tasks. Our first custom architecture is larger than the baseline because it needs more representational power to detect small decals within an image. The second architecture is much smaller because digit and corner-cut recognition is a simpler task. Our custom architectures reduce processing time and exceed accuracies relative to pre-trained architectures. We implemented our models on different edge hardware accelerators (e.g. the Google Coral, Nvidia Jetsons, and Intel NCS) and compared the performance when processing a realtime video stream. Our system can predict frames at 173.31 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with 98.5% mean average precision @ 0.5 IoU. INTRODUCTIONApproximately 4 million commercial vehicle inspections are conducted every year throughout North America to ensure the safe operation of vehicles on the road [1]. Specially trained safety inspectors in each state, province, and territory inspect commercial vehicles based on procedures, policy, and criteria developed by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), a non-profit association that operates throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico to regulate and improve commercial vehicle safety standards [2]. The CVSA was established to encourage the collaboration of law enforcement, government, and industry to promote an environment free of commercial vehicle crashes, deaths, and injuries. This would be achieved by establishing effective transportation safety standards for motor carriers, drivers, vehicles,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.