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 3: Lane Detection

This chapter will show one of the incredible things possible using computer vision in general and OpenCV in particular: lane detection. You will learn how to analyze an image and build more and more visual knowledge about it, one step after another, applying several filtering techniques, replacing noise and approximation with a better understanding of the image, until you will be able to detect where the lanes are on a straight road or on a turn, and we will apply this pipeline to a video to highlight the road.

You will see that this method relies on several assumptions that might not be true in the real world, though it can be adjusted to correct for that. Hopefully, you will find this chapter quite interesting.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Detecting lanes in a road
  • Color spaces
  • Perspective correction
  • Edge detection
  • Thresholding
  • Histograms
  • The sliding window algorithm
  • Polynomial fitting
  • Video filtering
  • ...