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

Summary

Well, you have had a great start to your computer vision journey toward making a real self-driving car.

You learned about a very useful toolset called OpenCV with bindings for Python and NumPy. With these tools, you are now able to create and import images using methods such as imread(), imshow(), hconcat(), and vconcat(). You learned how to import and create video files, as well as capturing video from a webcam with methods such as VideoCapture() and VideoWriter(). Watch out Spielberg, there is a new movie-maker in town!

It was wonderful to be able to import images, but how do you start manipulating them to help your computer vision algorithms learn what features matter? You learned how to do this through methods such as flip(), blur(), GaussianBlur(), medianBlur(), bilateralFilter(), and convertScaleAbs(). Then, you learned how to annotate images for human consumption with methods such as rectangle() and putText().

Then came the real magic, where you learned how...