Road traffic sign detection and classification

A vision-based vehicle guidance system for road vehicles can have three main roles: 1) road detection; 2) obstacle detection; and 3) sign recognition. The first two have been studied for many years and with many good results, but traffic sign recognition is a less-studied field. Traffic signs provide drivers with very valuable information about the road, in order to make driving safer and easier. We think that traffic signs must play the same role for autonomous vehicles. They are designed to be easily recognized by human drivers mainly because their color and shapes are very different from natural environments. The algorithm described in this paper takes advantage of these features. It has two main parts. The first one, for the detection, uses color thresholding to segment the image and shape analysis to detect the signs. The second one, for the classification, uses a neural network. Some results from natural scenes are shown. On the other hand, the algorithm is valid to detect other kinds of marks that would tell the mobile robot to perform some task at that place.