Local Contour Patterns for fast traffic sign detection

Advanced driver assistance systems have strong restrictions for real-time performance. Vision algorithms embedded in these systems need to balance accuracy and computational simplicity and there exists a continuous challenge to increase both goals. In this paper we define a new operator coined as Local Contour Patterns and use it in fast Hough-Transform-based approaches for circle and line detectors. We show an efficient implementation for traffic sign detection, relying only on shape information, that analyzes a 752 × 480 grayscale image in 40 ms in a Intel 8400 CPU, with a very good performance in real driving conditions.