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

Analog versus digital

The first thing to remember is that we live in an analog world. Nothing is instantaneous and everything is continuous. This is the reason why we can't teleport, sadly!

Similarly, analog signals are continuous and everchanging; they don't jump instantaneously but instead smoothly transition from one state to another. A prime example of an analog signal is the old Amplitude Modulation (AM) radio. You can see in the following figure how the smooth data signal is modulated onto a smooth carrier wave to create the smooth AM signal. Here, the pitch is represented by how quickly the amplitude is changing and the volume is represented by how great the amplitude is:

Figure 2.1 – Analog signal example

Figure 2.1 – Analog signal example

In contrast, a digital signal is one that is sampled at known points in time. When the signal is sampled, it is checked to see whether it is above or below a certain threshold, which will determine whether it is a logic 0 or...