Real time detection and recognition of traffic lights using component subtraction and detection masks

The traffic lights detection and recognition system is an essential module of the driver warning and assistance system. A method which is a color vision-based real time detection and recognition of traffic lights is presented in this paper This method has four main modules : traffic signals lights detection module, traffic lights boundary candidate determination module, boundary detection module and recognition module. In traffic signals lights detection module and boundary detection module, the color thresholding and the subtraction value of saturation and intensity in HSI color space and detection probability mask for lights detection are used to segment the image. In traffic lights boundary candidate determination module, the detection mask of traffic lights boundary is proposed. For the recognition module, the AND operator is applied to the results of two detection modules. The input data for this method is the color image sequence taken from a moving vehicle by a color video camera. The recorded image data was transformed by zooming function of the camera. And traffic lights detection and recognition experimental results was presented in this zoomed image sequence.