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

Summary

In this chapter, we focused on pre-trained neural networks, and how we can leverage them for our purposes. We combined two neural networks to detect pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic lights, including their color. We first discussed how to use Carla to collect images, and then we discovered SSD, a powerful neural network that stands out for its capacity to detect not only objects, but also their position in an image. We also saw the TensorFlow detection model zoo and how to use Keras to download the desired version of SSD, trained on a dataset called COCO.

In the second part of the chapter, we discussed a powerful technique called transfer learning, and we studied some of the solutions of a neural network called Inception, which we trained on our dataset using transfer learning, to be able to detect the colors of traffic lights. In the process, we also talked about ImageNet, and we saw how achieving 100% validation accuracy was misleading, and as a result, we had to reduce...