The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a smart city improves its efficiency in terms of communication and installation costs by scaling geographical distance through intelligent devices and digital information. Different applications in a smart city, including health care, road safety, industry and home automation, rely on the IoT. Considering the significance of the IoT in smart city road applications, this manuscript introduces a classifier matrix recognition system (CMRS) for improving realtime traffic optimization. This classifier matrix system performs an independent and matching analysis of the real-time traffic images and constructs a decision factor for deriving its conclusion. The conclusion is served as responding notifications through the connected IoT systems for the users employing roadsidecommunication-assisted applications. CMRS exploits the advantages of block classification and matrix operations for improving the correlation accuracy and similarity index. The experimental results indicate that the proposed CMRS improves correlation accuracy with a high similarity index and less processing time and dissimilarity rate. INDEX TERMS Block classification, image recognition, IoT, ITS, smart city, traffic management. I. INTRODUCTION The rapid development of the IoT is resulting in its services being used in different real-world applications. This communication platform is capable of connecting various elements, including humans, computers, machines, tiny sensors and other objects [1], [2]. More specifically, the connected devices are heterogeneous in nature, which facilitates pervasive access to resources, applications and services [3], [4]. The intelligence of the communicating devices in this paradigm provides anywhere and anytime access to resources the end user requests [5]. Because the interconnection of this platform incorporates heterogeneous devices, it supports various communication technologies ranging from device-todevice (D2D) to distributed cloud computing [6]. The independent operations of the devices are assisted via a wireless communication medium in which the protocol and technology are adopted appropriately. Distributed and concurrent The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Chao Chen.