Book Image

Hands-On Vision and Behavior for Self-Driving Cars

By : Luca Venturi, Krishtof Korda
Book Image

Hands-On Vision and Behavior for Self-Driving Cars

By: Luca Venturi, Krishtof Korda

Overview of this book

The visual perception capabilities of a self-driving car are powered by computer vision. The work relating to self-driving cars can be broadly classified into three components - robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. This book provides existing computer vision engineers and developers with the unique opportunity to be associated with this booming field. You will learn about computer vision, deep learning, and depth perception applied to driverless cars. The book provides a structured and thorough introduction, as making a real self-driving car is a huge cross-functional effort. As you progress, you will cover relevant cases with working code, before going on to understand how to use OpenCV, TensorFlow and Keras to analyze video streaming from car cameras. Later, you will learn how to interpret and make the most of lidars (light detection and ranging) to identify obstacles and localize your position. You’ll even be able to tackle core challenges in self-driving cars such as finding lanes, detecting pedestrian and crossing lights, performing semantic segmentation, and writing a PID controller. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to write code for a self-driving car running in a driverless car simulator, and be able to tackle various challenges faced by autonomous car engineers.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: OpenCV and Sensors and Signals
5
Section 2: Improving How the Self-Driving Car Works with Deep Learning and Neural Networks
12
Section 3: Mapping and Controls

Chapter 8: Behavioral Cloning

In this chapter, we are going to train a neural network to control the steering wheel of a car, effectively teaching it how to drive a car! Hopefully, you will be surprised by how simple the core of this task is, thanks to deep learning.

To achieve our goal, we will have to modify one of the examples of the CARLA simulator, first to save the images required to create the dataset, then to use our neural network to drive. Our neural network will be inspired by the architecture of Nvidia DAVE-2, and we will also see how to better visualize where the neural network focuses its attention.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Teaching a neural network how to drive with behavioral cloning
  • The Nvidia DAVE-2 neural network
  • Recording images and the steering wheel from Carla
  • Recording three video streams
  • Creating the neural network
  • Training a neural network for regression
  • Visualizing the saliency maps
  • Integrating...