Abstract: Traffic sign detection and recognition, which are important to ensure traffic safety, have been a research hotspot. In recent years, with the rapid development of automated driving technology, significant progress has been made in developing more accurate and efficient deep learning algorithms for traffic sign detection and recognition. However, these studies mainly focus on foreign traffic signs and do not consider the low-illumination conditions in practical application, which is a common scene. Therefore, many challenges still exist in the application of traffic sign detection and recognition in traffic scenes. To solve the problems of easy omission and inaccurate positioning for traffic sign detection and recognition under complex illumination conditions, the enhanced YOLOv3 (You only look once) detection algorithm, a traffic sign detection and recognition method combining real-time adaptive image enhancement and the YOLOv3 frame was proposed. First, a large and complex illumination traffic sign dataset for Chinese traffic was constructed; it included globally low illumination, locally low illumination, and sufficient illumination images. Then an adaptive enhancement algorithm was proposed for low-illumination images, which can enhance the difference between traffic signs and background by adjusting the brightness and contrast of the images. Finally, high-quality and discrimination images as input were transmitted to the YOLOv3 network framework, and traffic sign detection and recognition were performed. To reduce the influences of the prior anchor box setting accuracy and the imbalance between the background and foreground on the detection accuracy, the clustering algorithm for the prior anchor box and loss function for the network were optimized. The results of the comparison experiment with the LISA dataset and complex illumination traffic sign dataset for Chinese traffic show that the proposed enhanced YOLOv3 detection algorithm has higher regression accuracy and category confidence than the published YOLOv3 algorithm for traffic signs; the recall and precision are higher by 0.96% and 0.48%, respectively, which indicates the application potential of the proposed algorithm in actual traffic scenarios.