The recognition and tracking of traffic lights based on color segmentation and CAMSHIFT for intelligent vehicles

The recognition and tracking of traffic lights for intelligent vehicles based on a vehicle-mounted camera are studied in this paper. The candidate region of the traffic light is extracted using the threshold segmentation method and the morphological operation. Then, the recognition algorithm of the traffic light based on machine learning is employed. To avoid false negatives and tracking loss, the target tracking algorithm CAMSHIFT (Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift), which uses the color histogram as the target model, is adopted. In addition to traffic signal pre-processing and the recognition method of learning, the initialization problem of the search window of CAMSHIFT algorithm is resolved. Moreover, the window setting method is used to shorten the processing time of the global HSV color space conversion. The real vehicle experiments validate the performance of the presented approach.