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Enhanced Traffic Sign Detection in Severe Weather: A Multi-Teacher-Single-Student Knowledge Distillation Approach
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DOI：10.1007/s11760-026-05276-8.png)
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Abstract
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In autonomous driving, image degradation caused by severe weather (haze, rain, snow) significantly reduces the accuracy and real-time performance of traffic sign recognition, with prominent bottlenecks of insufficient generalization in single-modal methods and high computational costs in multi-modal methods. To address this, this paper proposes the YOLOv8n-MTSA model based on a Multi-Teacher-Single-Student Architecture (MTSA), featuring a core innovative phased lightweight learning mechanism. In the Knowledge Consolidation (KC) stage, Multi-Teacher Collaborative Knowledge Distillation (MT-KD) aggregates single-weather prior knowledge; Cross-Modal Feature Alignment (CFA) unifies features into a shared semantic space, paired with Bidirectional Feature Verification (BFV) to avoid detail distortion, and Soft Label Contrastive Learning (SCL) reduces multi-modal learning difficulty. In the Knowledge Evaluation (KE) stage, Hard Label Contrastive Learning (HCL) enhances real-scene discriminability, combined with pixel-level loss to optimize restoration. Experiments on a mixed-weather dataset show the model achieves image restoration with PSNR=34.023 and SSIM=0.927, detection mAP@50 of 88.2% (4.1% higher than YOLOv8n baseline), and maintains 70.4 FPS (14.2 ms per image) real-time performance, providing an efficient solution for in-vehicle deployment under complex weather.
Keywords:
Traffic sign detection
Severe weather
YOLOv8n
Multi-teacher-single-student architecture
Knowledge distillation
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