A robust, coarse-to-fine traffic sign detection method

We present a traffic sign detection method which has won the first place for the prohibitory and mandatory signs and the third place for the danger signs in the GTSDB competition. The method uses the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and a coarse-to-fine sliding window scheme. Candidate ROIs are first roughly detected within a small-sized window, and then further verified within a large-sized window for higher accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high recall and precision ratios, and is robust to various adverse situations including bad lighting condition, partial occlusion, low quality and small projective deformation.