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

Enhancing a video

Analyzing a video stream in real time can be a challenge from a computational point of view, but usually, it offers the possibility to improve precision, as we can build on knowledge from the previous frames and filter the result.

We will now see two techniques that can be used to detect lanes with better precision when working with video streams.

Partial histogram

If we assume that we correctly detected a lane in the previous few frames, then the lane on the current frame should be in a similar position. This assumption is affected by the speed of the car and the frame rate of the camera: the faster the car, the more the lane could change. Conversely, the faster the camera, the less the lane could have moved between two frames. In a real self-driving car, both these values are known, so they can be taken into consideration if required.

From a practical point of view, this means we can limit the part of the histogram that we analyze, to avoid false detections...