Advanced OR and AI Methods in Transportation ROAD AND TRAFFIC SIGN DETECTION AND RECOGNITION

This paper presents an overview of the road and traffic sign detection and recognition. It describes the characteristics of the road signs, the requirements and difficulties behind road signs detection and recognition, how to deal with outdoor images, and the different techniques used in the image segmentation based on the colour analysis, shape analysis. It shows also the techniques used for the recognition and classification of the road signs. Although image processing plays a central role in the road signs recognition, especially in colour analysis, but the paper points to many problems regarding the stability of the received information of colours, variations of these colours with respect to the daylight conditions, and absence of a colour model that can led to a good solution. This means that there is a lot of work to be done in the field, and a lot of improvement can be achieved. Neural networks were widely used in the detection and the recognition of the road signs. The majority of the authors used neural networks as a recognizer, and as classifier. Some other techniques such as template matching or classical classifiers were also used. New techniques should be involved to increase the robustness, and to get faster systems for real-time applications.