关键词: 计算机视觉, 交通灯识别, 形态学操作, Lab色彩空间, 模板匹配

Abstract: Traffic lights recognition is important for the intelligent vehicles research. A real-time traffic lights recognition method was presented. Firstly, the image was pre-processed by morphological operations. And then the candidate areas were found according to the samples of three kinds of traffic light got from Lab color space, which describes red, green, yellow color more effectively. Then, the candidate areas were filtered by traffic lights' shape characteristics. After that, three kinds of traffic lights templates, which were surrounded by a black rectangular box, were designed and used to confirm the candidate areas. At last, the results were validated by statistical methods. The experimental results show that the method is effective.

Key words: computer vision, traffic lights recognition, morphology operation, Lab color space, template match