Citation

Yabuuchi K, Hirano M, Senoo T, Kishi N, Ishikawa M. Sensors (Basel) 2020; 20(14): e4035.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s20144035

PMID

32698522

Abstract

LEDs are widely employed as traffic lights. Because most LED traffic lights are driven by alternative power, they blink at high frequencies, even at twice their frequencies. We propose a method to detect a traffic light from images captured by a high-speed camera that can recognize a blinking traffic light. This technique is robust under various illuminations because it can detect traffic lights by extracting information from the blinking pixels at a specific frequency. The method is composed of six modules, which includes a band-pass filter and a Kalman filter. All the modules run simultaneously to achieve real-time processing and can run at 500 fps for images with a resolution of 800 × 600. This technique was verified on an original dataset captured by a high-speed camera under different illumination conditions such as a sunset or night scene. The recall and accuracy justify the generalization of the proposed detection system. In particular, it can detect traffic lights with a different appearance without tuning parameters and without datasets having to be learned.

Language: en

Keywords

high-speed camera; image processing; intelligent vehicles; real-time systems; traffic light detection