EU speed-limit sign detection using a graphics processing unit

In this study we test the idea of using a graphics processing unit (GPU) as an embedded co-processor for real-time detection of European Union (EU) speed-limit signs. We implement a system that operates in real-time within the computational limits of contemporary embedded general-purpose processors. The input to the system is a set of grayscale videos recorded from a camera mounted in a vehicle. We implement a new technique to realize the radial symmetry transform efficiently using rendering primitives accelerated by graphics hardware to detect the location of speed-limit sign candidates. The system reaches up to 88% detection rate and runs at 33 frames per second on video sequences with VGA (640x480) resolution on an embedded system with an Intel Atom 230 1.67 GHz CPU and a Nvidia GeForce 9200M GS GPU.