TRAFFIC LIGHT RECOGNITION USING CIRCULAR SEPARABILITY FILTER

Shodai Horima, Kazunori Onoguchi

2012

Abstract

This paper proposes the camera-based approach to recognize the traffic light for driver assistance. The circular separability filter applied to RGB images extracts the area of the traffic light. The separability has large value in the boundary where the intensity between two areas changes like the step and it doesn't depend on the intensity difference (height of the step). Scanning the circular mask in each RGB image, the separability is calculated. The separability becomes large in an area where a color is homogeneous and a shape is similar to the circle. Therefore, the pixel with large separability is selected as the candidate of the traffic light. Unlike the conventional method which calculates the circularity from the binarized region, the proposed method can identify the traffic light whose outline is indistinct and whose radius is small. At first, the proposed method removes the region where the saturation is low and the brightness is extremely low or high because there is few possibility that the traffic light is included in these regions. Next, the circular mask is scanned in each RGB image captured from the on-vehicle color camera and the separability between the inside circle and the outside ring is calculated. The maximum value of separability calculated in RGB images is selected as the separability of each pixel. Pixels with large separability are detected as the candidate region of the traffic light. Finally, the candidate region around which inactive traffic lamps exist is identified as the traffic light. Experiments recognizing various traffic lights under various weathers and time show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Horima S. and Onoguchi K. (2012). TRAFFIC LIGHT RECOGNITION USING CIRCULAR SEPARABILITY FILTER . In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM, ISBN 978-989-8425-98-0, pages 277-283. DOI: 10.5220/0003741402770283

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram12,
author={Shodai Horima and Kazunori Onoguchi},
title={TRAFFIC LIGHT RECOGNITION USING CIRCULAR SEPARABILITY FILTER},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,},
year={2012},
pages={277-283},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003741402770283},
isbn={978-989-8425-98-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM,
TI - TRAFFIC LIGHT RECOGNITION USING CIRCULAR SEPARABILITY FILTER
SN - 978-989-8425-98-0
AU - Horima S.
AU - Onoguchi K.
PY - 2012
SP - 277
EP - 283
DO - 10.5220/0003741402770283