Image-based Visibility Estimation of Road Signs in Cluttered Environment

Abstract

This paper proposes an imaging-based system to estimate road sign visibility in a cluttered environment from the driver’s perspective in daytime using in-vehicle camera images. The proposed system can be deployed in both Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) and Driver Safety Support Systems (DSSS) as a choosing criterion of what information to provide to drivers. Driver Assistance Systems can only provide drivers with warnings about road signs with less visibility and high importance. The proposed system estimates the visibility by measuring the detect-ability of road signs. The detect-ability parameter measures the ability of the driver to locate road object from a scene and thus; it measures sign postage with respect to cluttered or complex environment. Road signs posted in complex environment are harder to be recognized by drivers and thus have low value for the detect-ability parameter. This paper proposes a visibility estimation system of road signs in the United States and experimental results are used to show its effectiveness.

US Road Sign Detection and Visibility Estimation using Artificial Intelligence Techniques

“…These features measure sign's positional relationships and the contrast between a traffic sign and its surroundings. In research [28], author proposed an imaging-based system to estimate road sign visibility in a cluttered environment from the driver's perspective in daytime using in-vehicle camera images. The proposed system deploys a geometric sign detector and suggests two visibility parameters which are color difference and environment complexity.…”