This report constitutes a long master thesis in Vision, Graphics, and Interactive Systems. It details the work done during almost two semesters abroad at UC San Diego. The work has been research oriented, the report is therefore structured in separate parts in contrast to a standard linear product development flow.
The scope of the research has primary been traffic light detection, but also the development of a vehicle detector at intersection used for naturalistic driving studies. A comprehensive survey of traffic light recognition (TLR) systems inducing both academic and industrial research has been done. From this it is clear that TLR research lack challenging public datasets and standardized evaluation methodology. Thus, the largest public dataset in the world with around 110,000 annotated traffic lights has been created and made available.
Finally a comparative analysis of a learning-based versus heuristic model-based approaches in relation to traffic light detection is done.

The work has resulted in submission of one conference paper to Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2015, two conferences papers to Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference 2015, and finally a journal paper for Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.