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

Adapting DenseNet for semantic segmentation

DenseNet is very suitable for semantic segmentation because of its efficiency, accuracy, and abundance of skip layers. In fact, using DenseNet for semantic segmentation proves to be effective even when the dataset is limited and when a label is underrepresented.

To use DenseNet for semantic segmentation, we need to be able to build the right side of the U network, which means that we need the following:

  • A way to increase the resolution; if we call the transition layers of DenseNet transition down, then we need transition-up layers.
  • We need to build the skip layers to join the left and right side of the U network.

Our reference network is FC-DenseNet, also known as one hundred layers tiramisu, but we are not trying to reach 100 layers.

In practice, we want to achieve an architecture similar to the following:

Figure 9.8 – Example of FC-DenseNet architecture

Figure 9.8 – Example of FC-DenseNet architecture

The horizontal red arrows...