Chapter 1: OpenCV Basics and Camera Calibration
This chapter is an introduction to OpenCV and how to use it in the initial phases of a self-driving car pipeline, to ingest a video stream, and prepare it for the next phases. We will discuss the characteristics of a camera from the point of view of a self-driving car and how to improve the quality of what we get out of it. We will also study how to manipulate the videos and we will try one of the most famous features of OpenCV, object detection, which we will use to detect pedestrians.
With this chapter, you will build a solid foundation on how to use OpenCV and NumPy, which will be very useful later.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- OpenCV and NumPy basics
- Reading, manipulating, and saving images
- Reading, manipulating, and saving videos
- Manipulating images
- How to detect pedestrians with HOG
- Characteristics of a camera
- How to perform the camera calibration
