Edge Deployable Lightweight Framework for Real-Time Driver Safety System with Integrated Lane Departure and Traffic Sign Recognition
Abstract: Lane departure and traffic-sign negligence are leading contributors to road accidents, particularly in regions with non-standardized signage and limited annotated data. Existing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) solutions are often developed as disjointed submodules, are rarely validated for real-time operation, and struggle to balance accuracy with low-latency inference for embedded deployment. We address these gaps with a unified, edge-deployable ADAS framework that simultaneously performs lane-departure warning (LDW) and traffic-sign detection and recognition (TSD/TSR), and validate the proposed system on automotive-class devices. Our framework combines a lightweight, lane-segmentation-driven LDW, which includes a drivable-area fallback for degraded markings, with a two-stage TSD/TSR pipeline consisting of efficient sign localization followed by fine-grained classification, designed to preserve accuracy at embedded latency. To support region-specific deployment under data scarcity, we curate a 35-class local traffic-sign dataset and introduce a generalized augmentation and balancing profile, expanding the corpus from 359 images to 8,750 samples. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, the integrated system sustains 15 FPS end to end (32 FPS for LDW and 18 FPS for TSD/TSR). The TSD/TSR branch achieves 97.4 mAP for detection and 95.6% validation accuracy (93.1% on a local real-world set) while maintaining an approximately 13.9 M parameter footprint. Relative to recent methods that target a single task or report results only on desktop-class GPUs, our approach delivers both LDW and TSD/TSR with real-time performance on edge hardware, providing a practical pathway to low-cost, field-ready ADAS in resource-constrained settings.