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Object detection and image recognition are some of the most significant and challenging branches in the field of computer vision. The prosperous development of unmanned driving technology has made the detection and recognition of traffic signs crucial. Affected by diverse factors such as light, the presence of small objects, and complicated backgrounds, the results of traditional traffic sign detection technology are not satisfactory. To solve this problem, this paper proposes two novel traffic sign detection models, called YOLOv5-DH and YOLOv5-TDHSA, based on the YOLOv5s model with the following improvements (YOLOv5-DH uses only the second improvement): (1) replacing the last layer of the ‘Conv + Batch Normalization + SiLU’ (CBS) structure in the YOLOv5s backbone with a transformer self-attention module (T in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name), and also adding a similar module to the last layer of its neck, so that the image information can be used more comprehensively, (2) replacing the YOLOv5s coupled head with a decoupled head (DH in both models’ names) so as to increase the detection accuracy and speed up the convergence, and (3) adding a small-object detection layer (S in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) and an adaptive anchor (A in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) to the YOLOv5s neck to improve the detection of small objects. Based on experiments conducted on two public datasets, it is demonstrated that both proposed models perform better than the original YOLOv5s model and three other state-of-the-art models (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv4-Tiny, and YOLOv5n) in terms of the mean accuracy (mAP) and F1 score, achieving mAP …