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

Retraining

Sometimes, once you get a neural network that performs well, you job is done. Sometimes, however, you might want to retrain it on new samples, to get better precision (as your dataset is now bigger) or to get fresher results if your training dataset becomes obsolete relatively quickly.

In some cases, you might even want to retrain continuously, for example, every week, and have the new model automatically deployed in production.

In this case, it's critical that you have a strong procedure in place to verify the performance of your new model in the validation dataset and, hopefully, in a new, throwaway test dataset. It may also be advisable to keep a backup of all the models and try to find a way to monitor the performance in production, to quickly identify anomalies. In the case of a self-driving car, I expect a model to undergo rigorous automated and manual testing before being deployed in production, but other industries that don't have safety concerns...