In this paper, an FPGA-based traffic sign recognition system is introduced for driver assistance applications. The system incorporates two major operations, traffic sign detection and recognition. The algorithms presented include hue detection for potential sign detection, morphological filters for noise reduction, labeling and Hausdorff distance calculation for template recognition. A new hardware platform is presented that combines a Zynq-7000 FPGA processing system and custom IP peripherals together. A frame-work for embedded system development on ARM CPU cores and FPGA fabric is introduced. The proposed hardware platform achieves up to 8 times speed-up compared to the existing FPGA based solutions.