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

The model

Now that you have a dataset of images and you know what you want to do (for instance, a classification), it's time to build your model!

We assume that you are working on a convolutional neural network, so you might even just use convolutional blocks, MaxPooling, and dense layers. But how to size them? How many layers should be used?

Let's do some tests with CIFAR-10, as MINST is too easy, and see what happens. We will not change the other parameters, but just play with these layers a bit.

We will also train for 5 epochs, so as to speed up training. This is not about getting the best neural network; it is about measuring the impact of some parameters.

Our starting point is a network with one convolutional layer, one MaxPooling layer, and one dense layer, shown as follows:

model = Sequential()
model.add(Conv2D(8, (3, 3), input_shape=x_train.shape[1:], activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling2D())
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(units...