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I am working on an idea for my capstone project. I am trying to get an idea of a device, sensor or reader that can detect the front traffic light situation. so that it can tell when the light is green or red. I am still not sure what is the best way to detect the light? Is there any possibilities that the sensor can tell the light color without using any corresponding sensors or devices in each single traffic light? I was trying to find how driverless cars can see the traffic lights but still no ideas yet.

I appreciate your participation.

peterh
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Almarhoon
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2 Answers2

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This will be done with a video camera. Writing software to process images is easier than it used to be. People are writing software on Raspberry pi (and I think, impressively, even Arduino) that do this sort of thing. And given that your application is a driverless car, it would need similar capabilities anyway. MATLAB software is actually capable of virtually writing the code for you. The difficult bits anyway. You'll need to buy various add-ons. While this is the easiest solution, bare in mind that this is still a hard problem. The tools are not for the faint hearted or the impatient. See here:

I can't imagine it having been done any way besides processing images from a camera.

Does that answers your question?

CL22
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  • Yep, the really hard part is identifying a traffic light assembly and distinguishing from all the other crapola in the scene. (Just imagine Times Square, for example). – Carl Witthoft Jul 18 '16 at 12:24
  • I am fairly positive that you cannot use Arduino for production for this application in question – Mahendra Gunawardena Jul 19 '16 at 02:33
  • @MahendraGunawardena good point - although I was just trying to say that I am pretty sure I have seen high end Arduino models used for basic computer vision in robotics. It's not impossible with suitably low frame rates/resolution, simple tasks and minimal neural network complexity, if that is the Arduino's sole task within a larger system, and if it is efficiently written in C etc (or assembler). – CL22 Jul 19 '16 at 06:00
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The state of any traffic lights is just one of the many elements that are extracted from the scene in front of the vehicle using video cameras and machine vision.

Software identifies objects such as other vehicles, pedestrians and other potential obstacles, plus information such as road edges, lane markings, signs and traffic signals.

Dave Tweed
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  • This is not an answer. – Carl Witthoft Jul 18 '16 at 12:23
  • @CarlWitthoft: I don't understand how this is any less of an answer than the one Jodes gave. I'm saying exactly the same thing, using different words. – Dave Tweed Jul 18 '16 at 12:31
  • Just saying "the software does it" is not really true -- it's not like you can buy the MATLAB IdentifyStopLight toolbox. You also don't address the question of video vs. any other metric. – Carl Witthoft Jul 18 '16 at 12:36
  • @CarlWitthoft: But it IS true. The only hardware involved is the video camera. The rest is entirely software. Nobody is suggesting that all of the software is commerically available -- this is a very active research topic, and anyone working on it is going to have to write some custom code. Look, this is a very broad question, because the OP is just looking for clues to get him started. Jodes and I have provided the same kind of clues. – Dave Tweed Jul 18 '16 at 12:45