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

Chapter 1: OpenCV Basics and Camera Calibration

This chapter is an introduction to OpenCV and how to use it in the initial phases of a self-driving car pipeline, to ingest a video stream, and prepare it for the next phases. We will discuss the characteristics of a camera from the point of view of a self-driving car and how to improve the quality of what we get out of it. We will also study how to manipulate the videos and we will try one of the most famous features of OpenCV, object detection, which we will use to detect pedestrians.

With this chapter, you will build a solid foundation on how to use OpenCV and NumPy, which will be very useful later.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • OpenCV and NumPy basics
  • Reading, manipulating, and saving images
  • Reading, manipulating, and saving videos
  • Manipulating images
  • How to detect pedestrians with HOG
  • Characteristics of a camera
  • How to perform the camera calibration