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

Detecting pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic lights with SSD

When a self-driving car is on a road, it surely needs to know where the lanes are and detect obstacles (including people!) that can be present on the road, and it also needs to detect traffic signs and traffic lights.

In this chapter, we will take a big step forward, as we will learn how to detect pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic lights, including the traffic light colors. We will use Carla to generate the images that we need.

Solving our task is a two-step process:

  1. Firstly, we will detect vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic lights (no color information), where we will use a pre-trained neural network called SSD.
  2. Then, we will detect the color of the traffic lights, where we will need to train a neural network starting from a pre-trained neural network called Inception v3, using a technique called transfer learning, and we will also need to collect a small dataset.

So, let's begin by using Carla...