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

Understanding machine learning and neural networks

According to Wikipedia, machine learning is "the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience."

What that means in practice, at least for what concerns us, is that the algorithm itself is only moderately important, and what is critical is the data that we feed to this algorithm so that it can learn: we need to train our algorithm. Putting it in another way, we can use the same algorithm in many different situations as long as we provide the proper data for the task at hand.

For example, during this chapter, we will develop a neural network that is able to recognize handwritten numbers between 0 and 9; most likely, the exact same neural network could be used to recognize 10 letters, and with trivial modifications, it could recognize all letters or even different objects. In fact, we will reuse it basically as it is to recognize 10 objects.

This is totally different from normal programming...