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

Summary

In this chapter, we went through many interesting topics.

We started by describing DAVE-2, an experiment of Nvidia with the goal to demonstrate that a neural network can learn how to drive on a road, and we decided to replicate the same experiment but on a much smaller scale. First, we collected the image from Carla, taking care of recording not only the main camera but also two additional side cameras, to teach the network how to correct errors.

Then, we created our neural network, copying the architecture of DAVE-2, and we trained it for regression, which requires some changes compared to the other training that we did so far. We learned how to generate saliency maps and get a better understanding of where the neural network is focusing its attention. Then, we integrated with Carla and used the network to self-drive the car!

At the end, we learned how to train a neural network using Python generators, and we discussed how this can be used to achieve more sophisticated...