A hierarchical method for traffic sign classification with support vector machines

Traffic sign classification is an important function for driver assistance systems. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical method for traffic sign classification. There are two hierarchies in the method: the first one classifies traffic signs into several super classes, while the second one further classifies the signs within their super classes and provides the final results. Two perspective adjustment methods are proposed and performed before the second hierarchy, which significantly improves the classification accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method gets an accuracy of 99.52% on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), which outperforms the state-of-the-art method. In addition, it takes about 40 ms to process one image, making it suitable for realtime applications.