Automatic Extraction of Route Information from Road Sign Imagery

With the advances of the big-data process technology, acquiring the real-time information from the massive image data taken by a mobile device inside a vehicle will be possible in the near future. Among the information that can be found around the vehicle, the route information is needed for safe driving. In this study, the automatic extraction of route information from the road sign imagery was dealt with. The scope of the route information in this study included the route number, route type, and their relationship with the driving direction. For the recognition of the route number, the modified Tesseract OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine was used after extracting the rectangular-road-sign area with the Freeman chain code tracing algorithm. The route types (expressway, highway, rural highway, and municipal road) are recognized using the proposed algorithms, which are acquired from colour space analysis. Those road signs provide information about the route number as well as the roads that may be encountered along the way. In this study, such information was called “OTW (on the way)” or “TTW (to the way)” which between the two should be indicated is determined using direction information. Finally, the route number is matched with the direction information. Experiments are carried out with the road sign imagery taken inside a car. As a result, route numbers, route number type, OTW or TTW are successfully recognized, however some errors occurred in the process of matching TTW number with the direction.