Self-Driving-Car-Lane-Detector

This program is used to extract the lane lines found on the road of any color only by using the video taken from dashcam

libraries used (python)

• open cv
• numpy
• moviepy (to grab frames from a video source and to store final video from processed images)
• IPython (to display the video on the webpage) jupyter is used to run this program

To run this Program

install the needed libraries . an easy way to do is to download the miniconda for your os and follow these steps provided in this link

• https://github.com/udacity/CarND-Term1-Starter-Kit/blob/master/README.md

steps

  * download CarND-Term1-Starter-Kit
  * choose between anaconda or docker 
    * #### for anaconda:
          https://github.com/udacity/CarND-Term1-Starter-Kit/blob/master/doc/configure_via_anaconda.md
    * #### for docker
          https://github.com/udacity/CarND-Term1-Starter-Kit/blob/master/doc/configure_via_docker.md

• after installation , open terminal or cmd prompt and run jupyter with this command
  • jupyter notebook
• this will open your default web browser .
• select the ProgramFinalSubmission.ipynb file .
• go to cell -> Run all

Pipeline of program

the working of this program can be breakdown into following steps
1. Load in the videosource on which you like to find the laneLine
2. breakdown the video frames into individual image frames
3. on that image frame , apply these following techniques
            1. convert from BGR image to grayscale image
            2. apply gaussian_blur to the grayscale image
            3. using canny edge detection , find the edges in the given image
            4. define a region of interest (roi) for each side (Left and Right) and apply them to the image which has the edges marked
            5. apply hough transform to the roi image separately (for Left and Right) . hough transform convert the dots in the image spaces to lines and gives us an output of numpy array with the end points of the line which joins the points in the image space
            6. try except block is used because , sometime we might get some frame on which we cannot compute any of our transformations . these frames might return error like math error , zero division error . it is a better practice to wrap them in a try,catch block to avoid unexpected errors
            7. find the common slope of the lines found on the right and left image separately 
            8. find the x,y of the points belonging to a common slope m , intercept c
            9. compute the top and bottom points of the line for both the right and left side image
            10. use drawWeightedImage function to draw lines using the top and bottom points onto a numpy zeros array and apply cv2.addWeighted between input image and image which has the line drawn
            11. store this final image as a video file
            12. use ipython.display to show the video on your notebook 

this program has some inspiration from http://flippidybits.com . thanks !!!!!!!

Potential shortcoming

  the shortcomes are
   * program is affected by the quality of the input video . presence of noise can cause the program to make wrong predictions
   * the Region of interest is not dynamic . it is fixed . more flexible roi should be used
   * discontinuity in the lane line cause jitter to the annotation
   * difference in the daylight , weather condition , sudden change in road color can affect the predictions

Areas to improve

   * apply filters like Kalman filter , particle filter to keep track of the lane line 
   * Image stabilization algorithm to remove noises
   * prediction of curve in the lane line