An Incremental Method for Developing a Road Sign Recognition System

Author: Pei-Shan Yen(Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering,NTNU),Chiung-Yao Fang(Department of Information and Computer Education,NTNU),Sei-Wang Chen(Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering,NTNU)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 47, No. 2
Date：October 2002
Pages：27-42
DOI：10.6301/JNTNU.2002.47(2).02

Abstract：

Road sign recognition is an important task in driver assistance systems. In this paper, we propose an incremental recognition approach based on the process of pattern recognition of the human vision system. When features of an object are detected, the human brain will make some reasonable assumptions based on these features and previous related experiences, and the vision system will collect more advanced features to verify these assumptions at the same time. If all features of the object are consistent with the viewer's cognition of it, then he "recognizes" the object. If he finds his assumptions to be incorrect he will make more reasonable ones, and will continue to find more features to support these new assumptions until he recognizes the object. Based on such incremental recognition procedures, then, we have developed an incremental road sign recognition system. When the system receives the video sequence captured by an on-board camera, the road sign detection module is activated and the road sign can be located and roughly classified based on the human mode of successive visual focusing; then the task is transferred to the road sign recognition module. However, the features of the road sign may be not sufficiently distinct for it to be correctly identified; for instance, the sign may be too far from the car. Therefore the system makes some assumptions according to the features it can detect and, in the meantime, it continues to collect more advanced features to modify its incorrect assumptions until the road sign is recognized. Our experimental results show that this system is reliable and feasible, that is, easily transferable to other recognition systems.

Keywords：incremental recognition,road sign recognition,human cognitive system

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