Advanced Lane Finding Project
The goals / steps of this project are the following:
- Compute the camera calibration matrix and distortion coefficients given a set of chessboard images.
- Apply a distortion correction to raw images.
- Use color transforms, gradients, etc., to create a thresholded binary image.
- Apply a perspective transform to rectify binary image ("birds-eye view").
- Detect lane pixels and fit to find the lane boundary.
- Determine the curvature of the lane and vehicle position with respect to center.
- Warp the detected lane boundaries back onto the original image.
- Output visual display of the lane boundaries and numerical estimation of lane curvature and vehicle position.
Rubric Points
Here I will consider the rubric points individually and describe how I addressed each point in my implementation.
1. Briefly state how you computed the camera matrix and distortion coefficients. Provide an example of a distortion corrected calibration image.
The code for this step is contained in the first code cell of the IPython notebook located in "./P2.ipynb"
I start by preparing "object points", which will be the (x, y, z) coordinates of the chessboard corners in the world. Here I am assuming the chessboard is fixed on the (x, y) plane at z=0, such that the object points are the same for each calibration image. Thus, objp is just a replicated array of coordinates, and objpoints will be appended with a copy of it every time I successfully detect all chessboard corners in a test image. imgpoints will be appended with the (x, y) pixel position of each of the corners in the image plane with each successful chessboard detection.
I then used the output objpoints and imgpoints to compute the camera calibration and distortion coefficients using the cv2.calibrateCamera() function. I applied this distortion correction to the test image using the cv2.undistort() function and obtained this result:
With the correction matrix obtained from last step, we can directly undistort new images with cv2.undistort(img, mtx, dist, None, mtx). An example is:
2. Describe how (and identify where in your code) you used color transforms, gradients or other methods to create a thresholded binary image. Provide an example of a binary image result.
I used a combination of color and gradient thresholds to generate a binary image (thresholding functions get_binary(), dir_threshold(), mag_thresh(), hls_thresh() in ./P2.ipynb). dir_threshold(), mag_thresh(), hls_thresh() produces individual masks, and get_binary() combine them in a smart way. Here's an example of my output for this step.
3. Describe how (and identify where in your code) you performed a perspective transform and provide an example of a transformed image.
The code for my perspective transform includes a function called warper(), which appears in lines 1 through 8 in the file example.py (output_images/examples/example.py) (or, for example, in the 3rd code cell of the IPython notebook). The warper() function takes as inputs an image (img), as well as source (src) and destination (dst) points. I chose the hardcode the source and destination points in the following manner:
src = np.float32(
[[(img_size[0] / 2) - 55, img_size[1] / 2 + 100],
[((img_size[0] / 6) - 10), img_size[1]],
[(img_size[0] * 5 / 6) + 60, img_size[1]],
[(img_size[0] / 2 + 55), img_size[1] / 2 + 100]])
dst = np.float32(
[[(img_size[0] / 4), 0],
[(img_size[0] / 4), img_size[1]],
[(img_size[0] * 3 / 4), img_size[1]],
[(img_size[0] * 3 / 4), 0]])This resulted in the following source and destination points:
| Source | Destination |
|---|---|
| 585, 460 | 320, 0 |
| 203, 720 | 320, 720 |
| 1127, 720 | 960, 720 |
| 695, 460 | 960, 0 |
I verified that my perspective transform was working as expected by drawing the src and dst points onto a test image and its warped counterpart to verify that the lines appear parallel in the warped image.
4. Describe how (and identify where in your code) you identified lane-line pixels and fit their positions with a polynomial?
Then I used the window search method to find out left and right lane pixels. Then I fit the lane lines pixels with a 2nd order polynomial. Code in find_lane_pixels_window_search() and fit_polynomial() in P2.ipynb.
5. Describe how (and identify where in your code) you calculated the radius of curvature of the lane and the position of the vehicle with respect to center.
I did this in function measure_curvature_offset_real() in my code in P2.ipynb
6. Provide an example image of your result plotted back down onto the road such that the lane area is identified clearly.
I implemented this step in function visulize_lane() in my code in P2.ipynb. Here is an example of my result on a test image:
1. Provide a link to your final video output. Your pipeline should perform reasonably well on the entire project video (wobbly lines are ok but no catastrophic failures that would cause the car to drive off the road!).
Here's a link to my video result
1. Briefly discuss any problems / issues you faced in your implementation of this project. Where will your pipeline likely fail? What could you do to make it more robust?
The most difficult part is to hand tune the binary thresholds. It's hard to come up with a param set that handles all situations well. To make this process easier I used some special testing pattern images (under ./test_images/pattern/) to tune the HLS threshold params. The pipeline may still fail in some conditions like cloudy day where the hue of lane lines may change dramatically.
I think to make the pipeline better in the future we can use CNNs to regress out the lane lines rather than hand-crafting features. CNNs would require more data to get a basic performance like this though.