Analysis of Retroreflection and other Properties of Road Signs

Abstract: Road traffic signs provide regulatory, warning, guidance, and other important information to road users to prevent hazards and road accidents. Therefore, the traffic signs must be detectable, legible, and visible both in day and nighttime to fulfill their purpose. The nighttime visibility is critical to safe driving on the roads at night. The state of the art gives clear evidence that the retroreflectivity improves the nighttime visibility (detectability and legibility) of the road traffic signs and that the nighttime visibility can be improved by using an adequate level of retroreflectivity. Furthermore, nighttime visibility can be affected by human, sign, vehicle, environmental, and design factors. The retroreflectivity and colors of the road signs deteriorate over time and thus the visibility worsens, therefore, maintaining the road signs is one of the important issues to improve the safety on the roads.  Thus, it is important to judge whether the retroreflectivity and colors of the road sign are within the accepted levels for visibility and the status of the signs are accepted or not and need to be replaced. This thesis aims to use machine learning algorithms to predict the status of road signs in Sweden. To achieve this aim, three classifiers were invoked: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Random Forest (RF). The data which was collected in Sweden by The Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) was used to build the prediction models. High accuracy was achieved using the three algorithms (ANN, SVM, and RF) of 0.84.3, 0.93, and 0.98, respectively. Scaling the data was found to improve the accuracy of the prediction for all three models and better accuracy is achieved when the data was scaled using standardization compared with normalization. Additionally using principal component analysis (PCA) has a different impact on the accuracy of the prediction for each algorithm.Another aim was to build prediction models to predict the retroreflectivity performance of the in-use road signs without the need to use instruments to measure the retroreflectivity or color. Experiments using linear and logarithmic regression models were conducted in this thesis to predict the retroreflectivity performance. Two datasets were used, VTI data and another data which was collected in Denmark by voluntary Nordic research cooperation (NMF group). The age of the road traffic sign, the chromaticity coordinate X for colors, and the class of retroreflectivity were found significant to the retroreflectivity in both datasets. The logarithmic regression models were able to predict the retroreflectivity with higher accuracy than linear models. Two suggested logarithmic regression models provided high accuracy for predicting the retroreflectivity (R2 of 0.50 on VTI data and 0.95 on NMF data) by using color, age, class, GPS position, and direction as predictors. Nearly the same accuracy (R2 of 0.57 on VTI data and 0.95 on NMF data) was achieved by using all parameters in the data as predictors (including chromaticity coordinates X, Y for colors). As a conclusion, omitting chromaticity coordinates X, Y for colors from the logarithmic regression models does not affect the accuracy of the prediction.