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

A bigger model

Training your own neural network is an art; you need intuition, some luck, a lot of patience, and all the knowledge and help that you can find. You will also need money and time to either buy a faster GPU, use clusters to test more configurations, or pay to get a better dataset.

But there are no real recipes. That said, we will divide our journey into two phases, as explained in Chapter 5, Deep Learning Workflow:

  • Overfitting the training dataset
  • Improving generalization

We will start from where we left off in Chapter 4, Deep Learning with Neural Networks, with our basic model reaching 66% validation accuracy on CIFAR-10, and then we will improve it significantly, first to make it faster, and then to make it more precise.

The starting point

The following is the model that we developed in Chapter 4, Deep Learning with Neural Networks, a model that overfits the dataset because it achieves a high training accuracy value at relatively low validation...