Hardware/Software Co-Design of a Traffic Sign Recognition System Using Zynq FPGAs

Traffic sign recognition (TSR), taken as an important component of an intelligent vehicle system, has been an emerging research topic in recent years. In this paper, a traffic sign detection system based on color segmentation, speeded-up robust features (SURF) detection and the k-nearest neighbor classifier is introduced. The proposed system benefits from the SURF detection algorithm, which achieves invariance to rotated, skewed and occluded signs. In addition to the accuracy and robustness issues, a TSR system should target a real-time implementation on an embedded system. Therefore, a hardware/software co-design architecture for a Zynq-7000 FPGA is presented as a major objective of this work. The sign detection operations are accelerated by programmable hardware logic that searches the potential candidates for sign classification. Sign recognition and classification uses a feature extraction and matching algorithm, which is implemented as a software component that runs on the embedded ARM CPU.