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

Chapter 7: Detecting Pedestrians and Traffic Lights

Congratulations on covering deep learning and progressing to this new section! Now that you know the basics of how to build and tune neural networks, it is time to move toward more advanced topics.

If you remember, in Chapter 1, OpenCV Basics and Camera Calibration, we already detected pedestrians using OpenCV. In this chapter, we will learn how to detect objects using a very powerful neural network called Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD), and we will use it to detect not only pedestrians but also vehicles and traffic lights. In addition, we will train a neural network to detect the color of the traffic lights using transfer learning, a powerful technique that can help you achieve good results using a relatively small dataset.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Detecting pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic lights
  • Collecting images with CARLA
  • Object detection with Single Shot MultiBox Detector...