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

Types of mapping and localization

The field of localization and mapping is absolutely full of amazing research and is continually growing. The advancement of GPUs and computer processing speeds has led to the development of some very exciting algorithms.

Quickly, let's get back to saving our ducks! Recall in the previous section that our dear sat-nav voice did not see the ducks crossing the road in front of us. A map will never be completely accurate since the world is ever-changing and morphing. Therefore, we must have a way to not only localize using a pre-built map but also build a map in real time so that we can see when new obstacles appear in our map and navigate around them. Introducing SLAM for the ducks (not dunks).

Although there are independent methods for mapping and localization, in this chapter, we will focus on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). If you are curious, though, the following is a quick breakdown of the most commonly used algorithms for...