A Far Road Sign Recognition by Applying Super-Resolution to Extracted Regions from Successive Frames

In the field of ITS technology, many methods have been proposed for detecting and recognizing road signs from car-mounted cameras. Most of these techniques are, however, for only still images. Therefore, the recognition results are affected by occasional changes of light conditions or occlusions. Moreover, though recognition of far placed signs are meaningful for safety driving, these signs are taken in low resolution images which that they are hardly recognition. In this article, we propose a novel technique for recognizing road signs. In this technique, a series of low resolution images of a road sign is extracted by using CONDENSATION from successive frames. Then, a pseudo-high resolution image of the road sign is generated by super-resolution using the series of images. The proposed techniques lead to early recognition results for far road signs even on images which are failed by traditional techniques.