This paper proposes a new method of traffic signal detection and recognition in an RGB color model. The proposed method firstly processes RGB-filtering in order to detect traffic signal candidates. Secondly, it performs adaptive threshold processing and then analyzes connected components of the binary image. The connected component of a traffic signal has to be satisfied with both a bounding box rate and an area rate that are defined in this paper. The traffic signal recognition system is implemented using C language in an embedded Linux system for a high-speed real-time image processing. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithms are quite successful.