  In recent years, data-driven methods have shown great success for extracting
information about the infrastructure in urban areas. These algorithms are
usually trained on large datasets consisting of thousands or millions of
labeled training examples. While large datasets have been published regarding
cars, for cyclists very few labeled data is available although appearance,
point of view, and positioning of even relevant objects differ. Unfortunately,
labeling data is costly and requires a huge amount of work. In this paper, we
thus address the problem of learning with very few labels. The aim is to
recognize particular traffic signs in crowdsourced data to collect information
which is of interest to cyclists. We propose a system for object recognition
that is trained with only 15 examples per class on average. To achieve this, we
combine the advantages of convolutional neural networks and random forests to
learn a patch-wise classifier. In the next step, we map the random forest to a
neural network and transform the classifier to a fully convolutional network.
Thereby, the processing of full images is significantly accelerated and
bounding boxes can be predicted. Finally, we integrate data of the Global
Positioning System (GPS) to localize the predictions on the map. In comparison
to Faster R-CNN and other networks for object recognition or algorithms for
transfer learning, we considerably reduce the required amount of labeled data.
We demonstrate good performance on the recognition of traffic signs for
cyclists as well as their localization in maps.
