Vehicle Detection Project

The goals / steps of this project are the following:

• Perform a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature extraction on a labeled training set of images and train a classifier Linear SVM classifier
• Optionally, you can also apply a color transform and append binned color features, as well as histograms of color, to your HOG feature vector.
• Note: for those first two steps don't forget to normalize your features and randomize a selection for training and testing.
• Implement a sliding-window technique and use your trained classifier to search for vehicles in images.
• Run your pipeline on a video stream (start with the test_video.mp4 and later implement on full project_video.mp4) and create a heat map of recurring detections frame by frame to reject outliers and follow detected vehicles.
• Estimate a bounding box for vehicles detected.

Video

Dataset visualize

I started by reading in all the vehicle and non-vehicle images. Here is an example of one of each of the vehicle and non-vehicle classes:

Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)

I then explored different color spaces and different skimage.hog() parameters (orientations, pixels_per_cell, and cells_per_block). I grabbed random images from each of the two classes and displayed them to get a feel for what the skimage.hog() output looks like.

I tried various combinations of parameters and here is my final HOG parameters using the YCrCb color space.

• orientations=12
• pixels_per_cell=(8, 8)
• cells_per_block=(2, 2)

I selecting the parameters with considering of the accuracy. Usually, I will pick up the best accuracy

Discussion

Here I'll talk about the approach I took, what techniques I used, what worked and why, where the pipeline might fail and how I might improve it if I were going to pursue this project further.