Robust method for road sign detection and recognition

This paper describes a method for detecting and recognizing road signs in grey-level and colour images acquired by a single camera mounted on a moving vehicle. The method works in three stages. First, the search for the road sign is reduced to a suitable region of the image by using some a priori knowledge on the scene or colour clues (when available). Secondly, a geometrical analysis of the edges extracted from the image is carried out, which generates candidates to be circular and triangular signs. Thirdly, a recognition stage tests by cross-correlation techniques each candidate which, if validated, is classified according to the database of signs. An extensive experimentation has shown that the method is robust against low-level noise corrupting edge detection and contour following, and works for images of cluttered urban streets as well as country roads and highways. A further improvement on the detection and recognition scheme has been obtained by means of temporal integration based on Kalman filtering methods of the extracted information. The proposed approach can be very helpful for the development of a system for driving assistance.