The identification of functional motifs in a DNA sequence is fundamentally a statistical pattern recognition problem. This paper introduces a new algorithm for the recognition of functional transcription start sites (TSSs) in human genome sequences, in which a RBF neural network is adopted, and an improved heuristic method for a 5-tuple feature viable construction, is proposed and implemented in two RBFPromoter and ImpRBFPromoter packages developed in Visual C++ 6.0. The algorithm is evaluated on several different test sequence sets. Compared with several other promoter recognition programs, this algorithm is proved to be more flexible, with stronger learning ability and higher accuracy.