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 9: Semantic Segmentation

This is probably the most advanced chapter concerning deep learning, as we will go as far as classifying an image at a pixel level with a technique called semantic segmentation. We will use plenty of what we have learned so far, including data augmentation with generators.

We will study a very flexible and efficient neural network architecture called DenseNet in great detail, as well as its extension for semantic segmentation, FC-DenseNet, and then we will write it from scratch and train it with a dataset built with Carla.

I hope you will find this chapter inspiring and challenging. And be prepared for a long training session because our task can be quite demanding!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing semantic segmentation
  • Understanding DenseNet for classification
  • Semantic segmentation with CNN
  • Adapting DenseNet for semantic segmentation
  • Coding the blocks of FC-DenseNet
  • Improving bad...