This paper proposes an algorithm to effectively detect the traffic lights and recognize the traffic signals using a monocular camera mounted on the front windshield glass of a vehicle in day time. The algorithm consists of three main parts. The first part is to generate the candidates of a traffic light. After conversion of RGB color model into HSI and YCbCr color spaces, the regions considered as a traffic light are detected. For these regions, edge processing is applied to extract the borders of the traffic light. The second part is to divide the candidates into traffic lights and non-traffic lights using Haar-like features and Adaboost algorithm. The third part is to recognize the signals of the traffic light using a template matching. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm successfully detects the traffic lights and recognizes the traffic signals in real time in a variety of environments.