Automated junction structure recognition from road guidance signs

Abstract

Recognition of road guidance signs is an important issue for developing driving assistance systems. One of major problems in this field is recognition of junction structure from road signs. In the proposed paper both detection and recognition problems are presented. Detection method based on color and shape properties of sign allows detecting signs in various lighting and weather conditions. Using interlaced images for most time-consuming operations and full-resolution images for final result reduces computation time without loss of quality. Recognition method is based on decomposition of guidance signs into principal components and representation of arrow region as a graph. Path extraction uses finite automate methodology which in order to recognize all possible paths to pass the junction. Proposed method showed processing speed about 10 fps and can be used in real-time applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.