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

Obtaining the dataset

Once you have a task that you want to perform with a neural network, the first step is usually to obtain the dataset, which is the data that you need to feed to the neural network. In the tasks that we perform in this book, the dataset is usually composed of images or videos, but it could be anything, or a mix of images and other data.

The dataset represents the input that you feed to your neural network, but as you may have noticed, your dataset also contains the desired output, the labels. We will call x the input to the neural network, and y the output. The dataset is composed of the inputs/features (for example, the images in the MNIST dataset), and the output/labels (for example, the number associated with each image).

We have different dataset types. Let's start with the easiest – the datasets included in Keras – before proceeding to the next ones.

Datasets in the Keras module

Usually a dataset is a lot of data. It's normal...