Automatic detection of traffic lights, street crossings and urban roundabouts combining outlier detection and deep learning classification techniques based on GPS traces while driving

The automatic generation of street networks is attracting the attention of research and industry communities in areas such as routable map generation. This paper presents a novel mechanism that focuses on the automatic detection of street elements such as traffic lights, street crossings and roundabouts which could be used to generate street maps and populate them with traffic influencing infrastructural elements such as traffic lights. In order to minimize the system requirements and simplify the data collection from many users with minimal impact for them, only traces of GPS data from a mobile device while driving are used. Speed and acceleration time series are derived from the GPS data. An outlier detection algorithm is used first in order to detect abnormal driving locations (which can be due to infrastructural elements or particular traffic conditions). Using deep learning, speed and acceleration patterns are automatically analyzed at each outlier in order to extract relevant features which are then classified into a traffic light, street crossing, urban roundabout or other element. The classification results are enhanced by adding the degree of atypicity for each point calculated as the percentage of times that a particular location is detected as an outlier in several drives. The proposed algorithm achieves a combined recall of 0.89 and a combined precision of 0.88 for classification.