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

Segmenting images with CNN

A typical semantic segmentation task receives as input an RGB image and needs to output an image with the raw segmentation, but this solution could be problematic. We already know that classifiers generate their results using one-hot encoded labels, and we can do the same for semantic segmentation: instead of generating a single image with the raw segmentation, the network can create a series of one-hot encoded images. In our case, as we need 13 classes, the network will output 13 RGB images, one per label, with the following features:

  • One image describes only one label.
  • The pixels belonging to the label have a value of 1 in the red channel, while all the other pixels are marked as 0.

Each given pixel can be 1 only in one image; it will be 0 in all the remaining images. This is a difficult task, but it does not necessarily require particular architectures: a series of convolutional layers with same padding can do it; however, their cost...