Patent ID: 11861915
Assignee: WAYMO LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  B | IPC B  G

Claim 13:
14. A vehicle configured to operate in an autonomous driving mode, the vehicle comprising:
a perception system including one or more sensors, the one or more sensors being configured to receive sensor data associated with objects in an external environment of the vehicle;
a driving system including a steering subsystem, an acceleration subsystem and a deceleration subsystem to control driving of the vehicle;
a positioning system configured to determine a current position of the vehicle; and
a control system including one or more processors, the control system operatively coupled to the driving system, the perception system and the positioning system, the control system being configured to:
receive, from the one or more sensors of the perception system, the sensor data associated with objects in the external environment of the vehicle, in which the received sensor data includes camera imagery and lidar data;
apply a generic sign detector to the sensor data to identify whether one or more road signs are present in an external environment of the vehicle;
identify, according to the generic sign detector, that a road sign is present in the external environment of the vehicle;
predict, according to the generic sign detector, properties of the road sign;
route, based on the predicted properties of the road sign, an image of the road sign to one or more selected sign classifiers of a group of sign classifiers to perform a sign type specific evaluation of the image;
route the image of the road sign to a text and symbol detector to identify any text or symbols in the image;
annotate a sign type to the road sign based on (i) classification results from the sign type specific evaluation by each selected sign classifier and (ii) any text or symbol information identified by the text and symbol detector; and
determine, based on annotating the sign type, whether to cause the driving system to perform a driving action in the autonomous driving mode.