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

The sliding window algorithm

While we are making progress, the image still has some noise, meaning there are pixels that can reduce the precision. In addition, we only know where the line starts.

The solution is to focus on the area around the line – after all, there is no reason to work on the whole warped image; we could start at the bottom of the line and proceed to "follow it." This is probably one case where an image is worth a thousand words, so this is what we want to achieve:

Figure 3.27 – Top: sliding window, bottom: histogram

Figure 3.27 – Top: sliding window, bottom: histogram

On the upper part of Figure 3.27, each rectangle represents a window of interest. The first window on the bottom of each lane is centered on the respective peak of the histogram. Then, we need a way to "follow the line." The width of each window is dependent on the margin that we want to have, while the height depends on the number of windows that we want to have. These two numbers can...