The accurate detection and recognition of traffic lights is important for autonomous vehicle navigation and advanced driver aid systems. In this paper, we present a traffic light recognition algorithm for varying illumination conditions using computer vision and machine learning. More specifically, a convolutional neural network is used to extract and detect features from visual camera images. To improve the recognition accuracy, an on-board GPS sensor is employed to identify the region-of-interest, in the visual image, that contains the traffic light. In addition, a saliency map containing the traffic light location is generated using the normal illumination recognition to assist the recognition under low illumination conditions. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on our data sets acquired in a variety of real world environments and compared with the performance of a baseline traffic signal recognition algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the high recognition accuracy of the proposed algorithm in varied illumination conditions.

In recent years, automated vehicle researches move on to the next stage, that is auto-driving experiments on public roads. Major challenge is how to robustly drive at complicated situations such as narrow or non-featured road. In order to realize practical performance, some static information should be kept on memory such as road topology, building shape, white line, curb, traffic light and so on. Currently, some measurement companies have already begun to prepare map database for automated vehicles. They are able to provide highly-precise 3-D map for robust automated driving. This study focuses on what kind of data should be observed during automated driving with such precise database. In particular, we focus on the accurate localization based on the use of lidar data and precise 3-D map, and propose a feature quantity for scan data based on distribution of clusters. Localization experiment shows that our method can measure surrounding uncertainty and guarantee accurate localization.

No abstract

No abstract