Road safety and driver assistance functionalities are of critical significance to automobile designing and manufacturing industry. Road accidents involving pedestrians are far more frequent at night than during day. Worldwide, the number of people killed in road traffic accidents each year is estimated at almost 1.2 million, while the number injured is estimated to be as high as 50 million. Thus, the combined population of five of the world's largest cities, fall prey to such undesirable and avoidable road accidents. Many of the people killed in such accidents are the pedestrians. One of the important factors responsible for such road accidents is driver's ignorance coupled with his reduced range of vision. Often, it becomes difficult to detect and recognize traffic signs and related objects which could have cautioned the driver and subsequent undesirable sequence of events could have been avoided. Hence, fewer pedestrians would be killed or seriously injured if vehicles were equipped with improved traffic signal detection, recognizing, and alarming systems.
Absence of a system, apparatus, device or method for detection and of recognition of traffic signs in automobiles is long standing problem.
Hence there is an urgent need for a solution that overcomes some of the existing lacunae in the traffic signs detection and recognition that are                Detecting the various traffic signs independent of day and night conditions (illumination invariant);        Detecting the various traffic signs in a robust manner;        Detection the various traffic signs which doesn't affected by distortions due to the noises in the images captured by the camera;        Detection the various traffic signs which doesn't affected by shape distortions due to problems in the manufacture of the traffic signs and different viewing distance; or        Recognizing the detected traffic signs in a robust manner;        Providing driver warning strategies upon traffic signs and other related objects recognition; and        The solution is simple and easy to install in the existing conventional systems.        
Some of the inventions which deal with detection and of recognition of traffic signs known to us are as follows: None of them address the lacunae stated above.
United States Publication number 20080266396 filed by Gideon Stein discloses about a method is provided using a system mounted in a vehicle. The system includes a rear-viewing camera and a processor attached to the rear-viewing camera. When the driver shifts the vehicle into reverse gear, and while the vehicle is still stationary, image frames from the immediate vicinity behind the vehicle are captured. The immediate vicinity behind the vehicle is in a field of view of the rear-viewing camera. The image frames are processed and thereby the object is detected which if present in the immediate vicinity behind the vehicle would obstruct the motion of the vehicle.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,575,171 filed by Zvi Haim Lev discloses about a system and method for reliable content access using a cellular/wireless device with imaging capabilities, to use part of a printed or displayed medium for identifying and using a reference to access information, services, or content related to the reference, including capturing an image of the reference with an imaging device, sending the image via a communications network to a processing center, pre-processing to identify relevant frames within the image and to perform general purpose enhancement operations, detecting the most relevant frame within the image, and frame properties, applying geometric, illumination, and focus correction on the relevant frame, using color, aspect ration, and frame color, to perform a coarse recognition and thereby limit the number of possible identifications of a reference within the relevant frame, and using specific techniques of resealing, histogram equalization, block labeling, edge operation, and normalized cross correlation, to identify the reference within the image.
Thus, in the light of the above mentioned background of the art, it is evident that, there is a need for an apparatus, device, system and method for detecting and recognizing various shapes of traffic signs and other related objects with driver warning strategies, which is simple, easy to install and provides higher accuracy at a lower cost.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds