# Traffic Light Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02158/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02147/) (2016)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [SCRDet++: Detecting Small, Cluttered and Rotated Objects via Instance-Level Feature Denoising and Rotation Loss Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13316/) (2020)
- [Salient Sign Detection In Safe Autonomous Driving: AI Which Reasons Over Full Visual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05804/) (2023)
- [Robust Traffic Light Detection Using Salience-Sensitive Loss: Computational Framework and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04516/) (2023)
- [Detecting Traffic Lights by Single Shot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02523/) (2018)
- [Traffic Light Recognition Using Deep Learning and Prior Maps for Autonomous Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11886/) (2019)
- [A Hierarchical Deep Architecture and Mini-Batch Selection Method For Joint Traffic Sign and Light Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07987/) (2018)
- [Towards Real-time Traffic Sign and Traffic Light Detection on Embedded Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02421/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TLD-READY: Traffic Light Detection -- Relevance Estimation and Deployment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07284/) (2024)
- [The ATLAS of Traffic Lights: A Reliable Perception Framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19722/) (2025)
- [Fool the Stoplight: Realistic Adversarial Patch Attacks on Traffic Light Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04823/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time traffic light recognition is essential for autonomous driving. Yet, a cohesive overview of the underlying model architectures for this task is currently missing. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of traffic light recognition methods that use convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We focus on two essential aspects: datasets and CNN architectures. Based on an underlying architecture, we cluster methods into three major groups: (1) modifications of generic object detectors which compensate for specific task characteristics, (2) multi-stage approaches involving both rule-based and CNN components, and (3) task-specific single-stage methods. We describe the most important works in each cluster, discuss the usage of the datasets, and identify research gaps.