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

Self-driving!

Now, you could start running manual_control_drive.py, maybe instructing it to use a lower resolution, using the --res 480x320 parameter.

If you press the D key, the car should start to drive by itself. It's probably quite slow, but it should run, sometimes nicely, sometimes less nicely. It might not always take the turns that it is supposed to take. You can try to add images to the dataset or improve the architecture of the neural network – for example, by adding some dropout layers.

You could try to change the car or increase the speed. You might notice that at a higher speed, the car starts to move more erratically, as if the driver was drunk! This is due to the excessive latency between the car getting in the wrong position and the neural network reacting to it. I think this could be fixed partly with a computer fast enough to process many FPS. However, I think a real fix would be to also record higher speed runs, where the corrections would be stronger...