Real-Time Traffic Light Detection With Adaptive Background Suppression Filter

Traffic light detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation system, and many detection methods have been proposed in recent years. However, illumination variation effect is still of its major technical problem in real urban driving environments. In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based traffic light detection method for driving vehicles, which is fast and robust under different illumination conditions. The proposed method contains two stages: the candidate extraction stage and the recognition stage. On the candidate extraction stage, we propose an adaptive background suppression algorithm to highlight the traffic light candidate regions while suppressing the undesired backgrounds. On the recognition stage, each candidate region is verified and is further classified into different traffic light semantic classes. We evaluate our method on video sequences (more than 5000 frames and labels) captured from urban streets and suburb roads in varying illumination and compared with other vision-based traffic detection approaches. The experiment shows that the proposed method can achieve a desired detection result with high quality and robustness; simultaneously, the whole detection system can meet the real-time processing requirement of about 15 fps on video sequences.