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

Summary

In this chapter, we built a nice pipeline to detect lanes. First, we analyzed different color spaces, such as RGB, HLS, and HSV, to see which channels would be more useful to detect lanes. Then, we used perspective correction, with getPerspectiveTransform(), to obtain a bird's eye view and make parallel lines on the road also look parallel on the image we analyzed.

We used edge detection with Scharr() to detect edges and make our analysis more robust than using only a color threshold, and we combined the two. We then computed a histogram to detect where the lanes start, and we used the "sliding window" technique to "follow" the lane in the image.

Then, we used polyfit() to fit a second-order polynomial on the pixels detected, making sense of them, and we used the coefficients returned by the function to generate our curve, after having applied reverse perspective correction on them. Finally, we discussed two techniques that can be applied to a...