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

Technical requirements

Our lane detection pipeline requires quite a lot of code. We will explain the main concepts, and you can find the full code on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Vision-and-Behavior-for-Self-Driving-Cars/tree/master/Chapter3.

For the instructions and code in this chapter, you need the following:

  • Python 3.7
  • The OpenCV-Python module
  • The NumPy module
  • The Matplotlib module

To identify the lanes, we need some images and a video. While it's easy to find some open source database to use for this, they are usually only available for non-commercial purposes. For this reason, in this book, we will use images and video generated by two open source projects: CARLA, a simulator useful for autonomous driving tasks, and Speed Dreams, an open source video game. All the techniques also work with real-world footage, and you are encouraged to try them on some public datasets, such as CULane or KITTI.

The Code in Action videos...