“Fast Detection of Traffic Light with Color and Edge Information”

The concern of the intelligent transportation system rises and many driver support systems have been developed. Especially, systems that use images are paid attention recently, and various researches on recognizing and understanding the road environment have been done. Recognizing traffic lights are important for safety driving. If it is possible to detect and recognize a traffic light, it will give useful information to a driver to understand the road environment. In this paper, a fast method of detecting a traffic light in a scene image is proposed. By converting the color space from RGB to normalized RGB, some regions are selected as candidates of a traffic light. Then a method based on the Hough transform using the color information as well as the edge information is applied to detect an exact region. Experimental results using images including a traffic light taken by a digital camera through a windshield verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.