Benchmark Evaluation of HOG Descriptors as Features for Classification of Traffic Signs

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance of the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as descriptors for traffic signs recognition. The test dataset consists of speed limit traffic signs because of their high inter-class similarities.   HOG features of speed limit signs, which were extracted from different traffic scenes, were computed and a Gentle AdaBoost classifier was invoked to evaluate the different features. The performance of HOG was tested with a dataset consisting of 1727 Swedish speed signs images. Different numbers of HOG features per descriptor, ranging from 36 features up 396 features, were computed for each traffic sign in the benchmark testing. The results show that HOG features perform high classification rate as the Gentle AdaBoost classification rate was 99.42%, and they are suitable to real time traffic sign recognition. However, it is found that changing the number of orientation bins has insignificant effect on the classification rate. In addition to this, HOG descriptors are not robust with respect to sign orientation.

Color detection and segmentation for road and traffic signs

This paper aims to present three new methods for color detection and segmentation of road signs. The images are taken by a digital camera mounted in a car. The RGB images are converted into IHLS color space, and new methods are applied to extract the colors of the road signs under consideration. The methods are tested on hundreds of outdoor images in different light conditions, and they show high robustness. This project is part of the research taking place in Dalarna University / Sweden in the field of the ITS.

Professional and Non-Professional Written Travel Texts – Do They Have Common Features? : A Comparative Investigation on Travel Texts on Trysil, Norway

This study aims to investigate possible distinctions between professional and non-professional written travel texts all treating the same destination: the Norwegian ski resort Trysil. The study will investigate to what extent the different texts correlate with the genre of travel texts, as the travel texts are treated as personal narratives, and how they conform to a given structure for narratives and with guidelines for professional writers. Furthermore, the investigation aims to explore to what extent there are similarities and differences between the texts regarding the given structure. The texts will first be analysed and organized separately by macrorules and a news schema that are constructed specifically for these sorts of texts, in order to reveal their discourse structure, and then compared to each other. As the discourse structure of the different texts is revealed, it is seen that there are certain differences between the two different text types. Finally, seen that the text types differ in their structure, this study will show that despite the fact that journalists write stories, and that non-professional written stories are narratives, they do not share the same structure, and are constructed in different ways.

The Old Road

The plot consists of the progression which the characters undergo. For the old man, the plot is his movement away from the earthly existence of the farm and into the physical process of the seasons. For the older grandson, it is the movement away from the past, symbolized by the farm, and into the present symbolized by his marriage and coupling with society. For the younger grandson, the movement is from childhood to the maturity which being alone demands in order for him to survive.