Boosted road sign detection and recognition

This paper presents a boosted system to detect and recognize roads signs from videos. The system first uses the Adaboost algorithm to learn the visual characteristics of road sign. Then, a cascaded structure is then used to detect road signs from videos in real time. After detection, a rectification process is then applied for rectifying different skewed road signs into a normal one. Then, its all embedded texts can be more accurately recognized using their distance maps. On the map, a weighting function is used to balance the importance between a road sign’s inner and outer feature so that its embedded characters can be more accurately recognized. Experimental results have proved the superiority of the proposed method in road sign recognition.