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

This has been a dense chapter! We discussed machine learning in general and deep learning in particular. We talked about neural networks and how convolutions can be used to make faster and more accurate neural networks, leveraging the knowledge of pixel proximity. We learned about weights, bias, and parameters, and how the goal of the training phase is to optimize all these parameters to learn the task at hand.

After verifying the installation of Keras and TensorFlow, we described MNIST, and we instructed Keras to build a network similar to LeNet, to achieve more than 98% accuracy on this dataset, meaning that we can now easily recognize handwritten digits. Then, we saw that the same model does not perform well in CIFAR-10, despite increasing the number of epochs and the size of the network.

In the next chapter, we will study in depth many of the concepts that we introduced here, with the final goal, to be completed by Chapter 6, Improving Your Neural Network, of learning...