Design of a visual perception model with edge-adaptive Gabor filter and support vector machine for traffic sign detection

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.12.072 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 3408 3838. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.(K.-J. Kim). Traffic sign detection is a useful application for driving assistance systems, and it is necessary to accurately detect traffic signs before they can be identified. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to detect traffic sign, which may be obscured by other objects or affected by illumination or lightning reflections. Most previous work on this topic has been based on region of interest analysis using the color information of traffic signs. Although this provides a simple way to segment signs, this approach is weak when a sign is affected by illumination or its own color information is distorted. To overcome this, this paper introduces a robust traffic detection framework for cluttered scenes or complex city views that does not use color information. Moreover, the proposed method can detect traffic sign in the night. We establish an edge-adaptive Gabor function, which is derived from human visual perception. It is an enhanced version of the original Gabor filter, and filters out unnecessary information to provide robust recognition. It decomposes the directional information of objects and reflects specific shapes of traffic signs. Once the extracted feature is obtained, a support vector machine detects the traffic sign. Applying scale-space theory, it is possible to resolve the scaling problem of the objects that we want to find. Our system shows robust performance in traffic sign detection, and experiments on real-world scenes confirmed its properties. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.