Inferring the actual urban road environment from traffic sign data using a minimum description length approach

Detecting Change in the Urban Road Environment Along a Route Based on Traffic Sign and Crossroad Data

“…A different RoED approach that uses traffic sign data as input was proposed in [7] and the associated method is now extended and developed herein. The proposed method relies on the availability of an on-board TSR subsystem and was developed for cars equipped with such a subsystem.…”

“…The research presented herein fits in the series of papers [7], [8] and [9] on statistical change detection problems pertaining various road environments and using traffic signrelated data as input. In [8], a statistical inference method for detecting a transition between two different topographical road environments when driving from one environment to the other was presented.…”

“…The somewhat impractical task targeted in the paper (i.e., finding the piedmont via looking at traffic signs along a route) was seen as a test case for the applied minimum description length (MDL) methodology. In [7], the change of the urban scenery -often experienced when driving from the periphery of a town to its centre, or the other way round -is traced in traffic sign logs. The task there was to identify the change-point between different urban road environments.…”

“…Minimum description length principle. An interesting approach to change detection in the dynamics of stochastic signals is based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle 7 . The approach was proposed in [16] and later elaborated in [17].…”

“…6 The PHCD was later adopted and analysed also for dependent data [13]. 7 The MDL principle has its theoretical foundations in information theory. The principle was proposed in [14] and later developed further in [15].…”