The invention discloses a traffic light recognition method. The method comprises steps as follows: performing binarization on the brightness component of the HSV color space of a traffic light target area in advance, acquiring a binarization result and extracting connected domains representing a traffic light bright area from the result through switching between an RGB space gray binarization method and an HSV color space binarization method on the basis of the area characteristic of the maximum connected domain, meanwhile, calibrating horizontal coordinates of a traffic light target by using difference between bright components of traffic light images in front and back frames, then designing a classifier, acquiring a classification recognition result of the traffic light target according to the number, colors and position characteristics of the extracted connected domains, and finally, when the traffic light is a yellow light, calibrating the vertical position of the traffic light target by using the vertical coordinate of the yellow light. The method has the advantages that the method is simple to implement, high in recognition accuracy, high in adaptability to different crossroad environments and low in computational complexity, fewer resources are occupied, and positions of the traffic lights can be calibrated.