Patent ID: 6453056
Filing Date: 2002-09-17
Classification: G06K,G06T

Abstract:
A method for automatically generating a database of road sign images and positions comprising the steps of:providing video images depicting roadside scenes that are recorded from a vehicle navigating a road and having a system that stores location metrics for those video images; analyzing said video images to identify a plurality of road sign images, wherein analyzing said video images initially analyzes each image frame of said video images to determine whether a road sign image is present and if a road sign image is not present that image frame is discarded from further analysis; storing in a database at least a pointer to a portion of an image frame of said video images corresponding to each of said plurality of road sign images, including the further processing for each image frame identified as having a road sign image present of: segmenting said image frame into at least one region of interest; applying at least one filter to each of said regions of interest which differentiates between various types of road sign images so as to classify each of said regions of interest by type; and storing in said database as a unique record in said database at least a portion of a bitmap corresponding to each region of interest in said image frame, said record including information identifying the type of road sign image classified from said at least one filter; and storing in said database a location data metric corresponding to a location of said vehicle for each of said plurality of road sign images when said image frame corresponding to that road sign image was originally recorded.