Current Issue
Romanian Journal of Information Technology and Automatic Control / Vol. 36, No. 3, 2026
Environment aware detection of traffic signs on low power edge devices using lightweight YOLO model
Gopika SAGASRAM, Kamesh SEKARAN, Maria Kalavathy GNANAMANI
Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) rely on the real-time detection of traffic signs to support both autonomous vehicles and driver-assistance systems. Unfortunately, due to limited computing power, memory, and environmental conditions (such as low light, glare, rain, and fog), developing an accurate detection system that runs on edge devices remains highly challenging. To address these issues, this research presents an environment-aware framework that leverages a YOLOv8 model (a version of YOLO optimized for edge devices) combined with adaptive preprocessing; therefore, it can adjust, in real time, both preprocessing functions and detection parameters using information from environmental conditions to ensure accurate detection of traffic signs on CPU-only devices. Additionally, the pre-trained weights of the YOLOv8 model are adjusted based on a carefully curated dataset, and the resulting model can be quantized for use with ONNX. The proposed system achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 91.0%, a precision of 96.1%, and a recall of 92.3% at up to 22 frames per second on low-resource platforms. This work contributes an environment-aware framework that fuses adaptive environmental condition analysis with YOLOv8 to achieve accurate traffic sign detection in real time.
Keywords:
Traffic sign detection, YOLOv8, Intelligent transportation systems, Edge deployment, Real-time detection.
CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Gopika SAGASRAM,
Kamesh SEKARAN,
Maria Kalavathy GNANAMANI,
"Environment aware detection of traffic signs on low power edge devices using lightweight YOLO model",
Romanian Journal of Information Technology and Automatic Control,
ISSN 1220-1758,
vol. 36(3),
pp. 39-52,
2026.
https://doi.org/10.33436/v36i3y202603