Traffic sign recognition using Ridge Regression and OTSU method

This paper presents an approach to detect and recognize traffic signs present in the urban scenes in China. The algorithm is composed of three steps that are color segmentation, shape detection and pictogram recognition. In the first step Ridge Regression is used to obtain a precise segmentation in RGB color space and achieves the same good performance as many machine learning based methods while using less computation time. Recognition process include a novel feature extraction involves OTSU method, and the feature extracted is robust against illumination variations and distortions. The algorithm has been run on several thousands of images with promising results.