Generation of Synthetic Traffic Sign Images using Diffusion Models

Abstract: In the area of Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR), deep learning models are trained to detect and classify images of traffic signs. The amount of data available to train these models is often limited, and collecting more data is time-consuming and expensive. A possible complement to traditional data acquisition, is to generate synthetic images with a generative machine learning model. This thesis investigates the use of denoising diffusion probabilistic models for generating synthetic data of one or multiple traffic sign classes, when providing different amount of real images for that class (classes). In the few-sample method, the number of images used was from 1 to 1000, and zero images were used in the zero-shot method. The results from the few-sample method show that combining synthetic images with real images when training a traffic sign classifier, increases the performance in 3 out of 6 investigated cases. The results indicate that the developed zero-shot method is useful if further refined, and potentially could enable generation of realistic images of signs not seen in the training data.