Detection and recognition of road traffic signs constitute an important element in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which can provide real-time road sign perception information to vehicles. In this paper, we proposed a new traffic sign detection method based on adaptive color threshold segmentation and the hypothesis testing of shape symmetry by leveraging traffic signs and image data. First, we calculated an adaptive segmentation threshold using the cumulative distribution function of the image histogram. Based on this, we designed an approximate maximum and minimum normalization method, which is used to suppress the interference of high brightness area and background in image thresholding processes. Secondly, we transformed the highlight shape feature of thresholding image into a connected domain feature vector. And we formulated a shape symmetry detection algorithm based on statistical hypothesis testing to efficiently extract the ROI of traffic signs based on traffic data analysis. We performed some comprehensive experiments on the GTSDB (German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark) dataset. The accuracy of traffic sign detection exceeded 94%. This method has higher detection accuracy and time efficiency than other methods, and better robustness under complex traffic environment.