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

Understanding DenseNet for classification

DenseNet is a fascinating architecture of neural networks that is designed to be flexible, memory efficient, effective, and also relatively simple. There are really a lot of things to like about DenseNet.

The DenseNet architecture is designed to build very deep networks, solving the problem of the vanishing gradient with techniques derived from ResNet. Our implementation will reach 50 layers, but you can easily build a deeper network. In fact, Keras has three types of DenseNet trained on ImageNet, with 121, 169, and 201 layers, respectively. DenseNet also solves the problem of dead neurons, when you have neurons that are basically not active.The next section will show a high-level overview of DenseNet.

DenseNet from a bird's-eye view

For the moment, we will focus on DenseNet as a classifier, which is not what we are going to implement, but it is useful as a concept to start to understand it. The high-level architecture of DenseNet...