The demand for reliable traffic sign recognition (TSR) increases with the development of safety driven advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Emerging technologies like brake-by-wire or steer-by-wire pave the way for collision avoidance and threat identification systems. Obviously, decision making in such critical situations requires high reliability of the information base. Especially for comfort systems, we need to take into account that the user tends to trust the information provided by the ADAS. In this paper, we present a robust system architecture for the reliable recognition of circular traffic signs. Our system employs complementing approaches for the different stages of current TSR systems. This introduces the application of local SIFT features for content-based traffic sign detection along with widely applied shape-based approaches. We further add a technique called contracting curve density (CCD) to refine the localization of the detected traffic sign candidates and therefore increase the performance of the subsequent classification module. Finally, the recognition stage based on SIFT and SURF descriptions of the candidates executed by a neural net provides a robust classification of structured image content like traffic signs. By applying these steps we compensate the weaknesses of the utilized approaches, and thus, improve the system's performance.