The invention discloses a method for recognizing a road traffic sign for an unmanned vehicle, comprising the following steps of: (1) changing the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) pixel value of an image to strengthen a traffic sign feature color region, and cutting the image by using a threshold; (2) carrying out edge detection and connection on a gray level image to reconstruct an interested region; (3) extracting a labeled graph of the interested region as a shape feature of the interested region, classifying the shape of the region by using a nearest neighbor classification method, and removing a non-traffic sign region; and (4) graying and normalizing the image of the interested region of the traffic sign, carrying out dual-tree complex wavelet transform on the image to form a feature vector of the image, reducing the dimension of the feature vector by using a two-dimension independent component analysis method, and sending the feature vector into a support vector machine of a radial basis function to judge the type of the traffic sign of the interested region. By using the method, various types of traffic signs in a running environment of the unmanned vehicle can be stably and efficiently detected and recognized.