Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and high missed rate of the existing traditional algorithms in traffic light recognition under the condition of uneven illumination and complex background, this paper proposes a traffic light recognition method based on image enhancement.First, an improved iterative method is used to process the original image.Then, the v-channel brightness information of the original image is enhanced in the HSV color space, and the color candidate regions of traffic lights are screened by self-adjusting color threshold range.Finally, the contour of the original image obtained after dual processing was extracted respectively, and the candidate area with the same information was screened by combining the contour information of the two images, and the area of the traffic signal light was judged by calculating the area and aspect ratio of the candidate area, so as to complete the identification of the traffic lights.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the recognition accuracy by 1.05% compared with other traditional algorithms under the condition of uneven illumination and complex background, and has good real-time performance.