Safe Driving at Traffic Lights: An Image Recognition Based Approach

With the increasing number of vehicles, the number of traffic accidents also increases, especially at traffic lights. To enhance the driving safety at traffic lights, in this paper, we propose an intelligent safe driving assistant to provide drivers with driving advice based on traffic light phases, which information has been neglected by existing research. The driving assistant consists of an image recognition system with a single on-board camera, which can ameliorate the difficulties of observing traffic light phases. The recognition system obtains traffic light countdown information using a Convolutional Neural Network, and estimates the countdown time using the results of traffic light information. In addition, we develop a model to calculate the distance between the traffic light and vehicle by using the information of camera and traffic light. Based on the traffic light phase and the distance obtained, the driving assistant can provide a velocity control strategy to improve driver's safety. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of proposed methods.