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Detecting and classifying real-life small traffic signs from large input images is difficult due to their occupying fewer pixels relative to larger targets. To address this challenge, we proposed a deep-learning-based model (Dense-RefineDet) that applies a single-shot, object-detection framework (RefineDet) to maintain a suitable accuracy–speed trade-off. We constructed a dense connection-related transfer-connection block to combine high-level feature layers with low-level feature layers to optimize the use of the higher layers to obtain additional contextual information. Additionally, we presented an anchor-design method to provide suitable anchors for detecting small traffic signs. Experiments using the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset demonstrated that Dense-RefineDet achieved competitive accuracy at high-speed detection (0.13 s/frame) of small-, medium-, and large-scale traffic signs (recall: 84.3%, 95.2%, and 92.6%; precision: 83.9%, 95.6%, and 94.0%). Moreover, experiments using the Caltech pedestrian dataset indicated that the miss rate of Dense-RefineDet was 54.03% (pedestrian height > 20 pixels), which outperformed other state-of-the-art methods.