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

Why you need maps and localization

In this chapter, you will learn the importance of maps and localization, and the combination of them. Maps and localization are things we often take for granted in the modern world, but as you will see, they are very important, especially for self-driving cars, where the amazing human brain is not utilized.

Maps

Take a moment and imagine a world without cell phones, without MapQuest (yup, I'm an elder millennial), without paper maps, and without Anaximander of Greece!

How well do you think you could navigate from your home to a city you have never been to, let alone the new Trader Joe's that just opened a few cities away? I am sure you could do it, but you would probably stop every few kilometers and ask a local for the next few directions to get you closer to that bold and earthy Two Buck Chuck. But you can see why maps really make our lives easier and open up possibilities to venture to new places with little fear of getting...