Improving traffic sign recognition results in urban areas by overcoming the impact of scale and rotation

Abstract

Automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs have many applications. However, some problems can affect the accuracy of the existing algorithms, such as changes in environmental light conditions, shadows, the presence of objects of the same colour, significant changes in scale and rotation, as well as obstacles in front of the traffic signs. To overcome these difficulties, a reference image database is usually used that includes different modes of appearing the traffic signs in the images. In order to overcome the effects of scale and rotation, in this paper a new method is presented in which only one reference image is needed for each sign to recognise the traffic sign in an image. In the proposed method, imaging is done in stereo. Using the captured image pair, a virtual image is generated which is then used to recognise the sign. As a result, the recognition is carried out with a minimum number of reference images. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves recognition results. The traffic signs are recognised with 93.1% accuracy that enjoys a 4.9% improvement over traditional methods.