Abstract: Despite the achievements made in the last decade, the following problems facing the researchers in the field of TSR remain unsolved. First, the objects for recognition research are too few tohave generality, training examples remain scant. Second, alternative processing approaches or intelligent approaches has not attracted due attention. Third, applica- tion research cannot receive as much attention as that to theories. Fourth, standard or gray images, instead of real or color ones, are mostly studied in experiments. Now the main difficulties in TSR are as follows： fiirst, the traffic sign＇s background is changeable and not controllable, so color distortion is serious and algebraic distortion exists to various degrees; second, the theory and technology in color image processing need improvement. Adopting intellectual methods and using color infor- mation are supposed to be the trends of TSR.