The increase in traffic accidents is becoming a serious social problem with the recent rapid traffic increase. In many cases, the driver’s carelessness is the primary factor of traffic accidents, and the driver assistance system is demanded for supporting driver’s safety. In this research, we propose the new method of automatic detection and recognition of road signs by image processing. The purpose of this research is to prevent accidents caused by driver’s carelessness, and call attention to a driver when the driver violates traffic a regulation. In this research, high accuracy and the efficient sign detecting method are realized by removing unnecessary information except for a road sign from an image, and detect a road sign using shape features. At first, the color information that is not used in road signs is removed from an image. Next, edges except for circular and triangle ones are removed to choose sign shape. In the recognition process, normalized cross correlation operation is carried out to the two-dimensional differentiation pattern of a sign, and the accurate and efficient method for detecting the road sign is realized. Moreover, the real-time operation in a software base was realized by holding down calculation cost, maintaining highly precise sign detection and recognition. Specifically, it becomes specifically possible to process by 0.1 sec(s)/frame using a general-purpose PC (CPU: Pentium4 1.7GHz). As a result of in-vehicle experimentation, our system could process on real time and has confirmed that detection and recognition of a sign could be performed correctly.

Date Published: 21 November 2002
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4790, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXV, (21 November 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.452140

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4790:
Applications of Digital Image Processing XXV
Andrew G. Tescher, Editor(s)