Vision for Looking at Traffic Lights: Issues, Survey, and Perspectives

This paper presents the challenges that researchers must overcome in traffic light recognition (TLR) research and provides an overview of ongoing work. The aim is to elucidate which areas have been thoroughly researched and which have not, thereby uncovering opportunities for further improvement. An overview of the applied methods and noteworthy contributions from a wide range of recent papers is presented, along with the corresponding evaluation results. The evaluation of TLR systems is studied and discussed in depth, and we propose a common evaluation procedure, which will strengthen evaluation and ease comparison. To provide a shared basis for comparing TLR systems, we publish an extensive public data set based on footage from U.S. roads. The data set contains annotated video sequences, captured under varying light and weather conditions using a stereo camera. The data set, with its variety, size, and continuous sequences, should challenge current and future TLR systems.