Real-time traffic sign recognition in three stages

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) is an important component of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The traffic signs enhance traffic safety by informing the driver of speed limits or possible dangers such as icy roads, imminent road works or pedestrian crossings. We present a three-stage real-time Traffic Sign Recognition system in this paper, consisting of a segmentation, a detection and a classification phase. We combine the color enhancement with an adaptive threshold to extract red regions in the image. The detection is performed using an efficient linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features. The tree classifiers, K-d tree and Random Forest, identify the content of the traffic signs found. A spatial weighting approach is proposed to improve the performance of the K-d tree. The Random Forest and Fisher's Criterion are used to reduce the feature space and accelerate the classification. We show that only a subset of about one third of the features is sufficient to attain a high classification accuracy on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB). (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.