Pattern recognition methods are used in the final stage of a traffic sign detection and recognition system, where the main objective is to categorize a detected sign. Support vector machines have been reported as a good method to achieve this main target due to their ability to provide good accuracy as well as being sparse methods. Nevertheless, for complete data sets of traffic signs the number of operations needed in the test phase is still large, whereas the accuracy needs to be improved. The objectives of this work are to propose pre-processing methods and improvements in support vector machines to increase the accuracy achieved while the number of support vectors, and thus the number of operations needed in the test phase, is reduced. Results show that with the proposed methods the accuracy is increased 3-5% with a reduction in the number of support vectors of 50-70%.

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