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 4: Deep Learning with Neural Networks

This chapter is an introduction to neural networks with Keras. If you have already worked with MNIST or CIFAR-10 image classification datasets, feel free to skip it. But if you have never trained a neural network, this chapter might have some surprises in store for you.

This chapter is quite practical, to give you very quickly something to play with, and we will skip as much theory as reasonably possible and learn how to recognize handwritten numbers (composed of one single digit) with high precision. The theory behind what we do here, and more, will be covered in the next chapter.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Machine learning
  • Neural networks and their parameters
  • Convolutional neural networks
  • Keras, a deep learning framework
  • The MNIST dataset
  • How to build and train a neural network
  • The CIFAR-10 dataset