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

Learning about convolutional neural networks

If you look at a classical neural network, you can see that the first layer is composed of inputs, standing on a line. This is not only a graphical representation: for a classical neural network, an input is an input, and it should be independent of the other ones. This is probably fine if you are trying to predict the price of an apartment based on size, ZIP code, and floor number, but it does not seem optimal for an image, where pixels have neighbors and it seems intuitive that keeping this proximity information is important.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) solve exactly this problem, and it turns out that not only can they process images efficiently, but they can also be used with success for natural language processing.

A CNN is a neural network that has at least one convolutional layer, which is inspired by the visual cortex of animals, where individual neurons respond only to stimuli in a small area of the field of vision...