야간 영상에서의 빛 번짐 현상을 이용한 교통신호등 인식

Abstract

Traffic lights at night are usually framed in the image as bright regions bigger than the real size due to glow effect. Moreover, the colors of lighting region saturate to white. So it is difficult to distinguish between different traffic lights at night. Many related studies have tried to decrease the glow effect in the process of capturing images. Some studies drastically decreased the shutter time of the camera to reduce the adverse effect by the glow. However, this makes the video too dark. This study proposes a new idea which utilizes the glow effect. It examines the outer radial region of traffic light. It presents an algorithm to discriminate the color of traffic light by the analysis of the outer radial region. The advantage of the proposed method is that it can recognize traffic lights in the image captured by an ordinary black box camera. Experimental results using seven short videos show the performance of traffic light recognition reporting the precision of 96.4% and the recall of 98.2%. These results show that the proposed method is valid and effective.