The invention discloses a traffic light positioning method. The method comprises: expanding an object region where traffic lights are in in advance, obtaining a constraint region, and performing binaryzation on a grayscale image of the constraint region, extracting proportion of bright regions, the number of small area bright regions, the number of standard light area bright regions, the number of large area bright regions, and the average gray value of dark regions from binarization images, according to the features, determining day or night of an intersection image where the object region is in, if the image is a night image, detecting signal lights whose states are lightened through the binarization image, and according to the positions of the signal lights, adjusting positions of the traffic light; if the image is a day image, detecting a black frame in a traffic light structure through the binaryzation image, and according to the position of the black frame, adjusting the positions of the traffic light. The method is advantaged by low calculation complexity, fast operation speed, good environment adaptability, and simple realization.