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 the three datasets

In reality, you don't need one dataset, but ideally three. These are required for training, validation, and testing. Before defining them, please consider that unfortunately sometimes, there is some confusion regarding the meaning of validation and test, typically where only two datasets are available, as in this case, validation and test datasets coincide. We did the same in Chapter 4, Deep Learning with Neural Networks, where we used the test dataset as validation.

Let's now define these three datasets, and then we can explain how ideally we should have tested the MNIST dataset:

  • Training dataset: This is the dataset used to train the neural network, and it is typically the biggest of the three datasets.
  • Validation dataset: This is usually a hold-out part of the training dataset that is not used for training, but only to evaluate the performance of a model and tune its hyperparameters (for example, the topology of the network...