Vision-Language Work Zone Intelligence for Safety-Critical Speed Regulation of Mixed-Autonomy Vehicles in Dynamic Environments

Temporary work-zone speed limits are communicated through visually inconsistent signage and are often missing from digital maps, creating safety risks for human drivers and automated vehicle systems. We present a real-time, onboard perception pipeline that detects active work zones, recognizes associated temporary speed limits, and outputs a law-aware work-zone state and speed value suitable for driver alerts or downstream automated control. The system fuses object detections with semantic verification and temporally smoothed, hysteresis-based state transitions to reduce false activations and flicker in dynamic scenes, and runs fully on low-cost embedded hardware. Evaluated manually on a annotated subset of the ROADWork dataset (490 sequences), the system achieves inside-work-zone event-level recall of 96.5% and event-level precision of 68.7%. Speed-limit recognition evaluated on 35 minutes of in-house driving data attains 95.45% precision and 53.85% recall, with no incorrect speed classifications and a single false positive. These results demonstrate a practical, scalable approach for grounding work-zone speed awareness directly in onboard perception rather than maps or infrastructure. We release our source code for the proposed system pipeline on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/Mi3-Lab/workzone