Real-time traffic sign detection with vehicle camera images

Abstract

This paper presents a real-time traffic sign detection method using color properties and shape-based features for real-world environment applications. The proposed method has two main steps: color- based region segmentation and shape-based verification of the segmented area. In the first step, region-of-interest (ROI) is roughly segmented by a simple color-based thresholding method and each segment is corrected by a guided filter. Next, each ROI is verified through a shape analysis to decide whether the ROI is a circle or a triangle. For detecting circles, we compare three different methods: RSD, BCT, and STVUE. For triangles, RPD, VBT and STVUT were applied. We evaluated these alternatives with 232 experimental images containing 142 circular signs and 82 triangular signs. We found that RSD in the circle detection and STVUT in the triangle detection provide the best detection rates of 93% and 90% respectively. The main contribution of this paper is to present a novel approach for extracting boundary of traffic sign. Copyright © 2013 ACM.