Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists::Researchers call for tighter regulations following major age and race-based discrepancies in AI autonomous systems.
Easy solution is to enforce a buddy system. For every black person walking alone at night must accompanied by a white person. /s
Loved that show.
But you have to hire equally so some may get darker skinned buddies. Who will then need buddies.
I think this is one of my favorite TV episodes ever. Better Off Ted deserved better.
LiDAR doesn’t see skin color or age. Radar doesn’t either. Infra-red doesn’t either.
LiDAR, radar and infra-red may still perform worse on children due to children being smaller and therefore there would be fewer contact points from the LiDAR reflection.
I work in a self driving R&D lab.
How about skin color? Does darker skin reflect LiDAR/infrared the same way as light skin?
Infrared cameras don’t depend on you reflecting infrared. You’re emitting it.
All matter emits light; the frequencies that it’s brightest in depend on the matter’s temperature. Objects around human body temperature mostly glow in the long-wave infrared. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is; “color” is a different chunk of spectrum.
That’s a fair observation! LiDAR, radar, and infra-red systems might not directly detect skin color or age, but the point being made in the article is that there are challenges when it comes to accurately detecting darker-skinned pedestrians and children. It seems that the bias could stem from the data used to train these AI systems, which may not have enough diverse representation.
The main issue, as someone else pointed out as well, is in image detection systems only, which is what this article is primarily discussing. Lidar does have its own drawbacks, however. I wouldn’t be surprised if those systems would still not detect children as reliably. Skin color wouldn’t definitely be a consideration for it, though, as that’s not really how that tech works.
Do lidar and infrared work equally on white and black people? Both are still optical systems, and I don’t know how well black people reflect infrared light.
Seriously no pun intended: infrared cameras see black-body radiation, which depends on the temperature of the object being imaged, not its surface chemistry. As long as a person has a live human body temperature, they’re glowing with plenty of long-wave IR to see them, regardless of their skin melanin content.
I thought we were talking about near-IR cameras using active illumination (so, an IR spotlight).
I didn’t think low-wave IR cameras are fast enough and have enough resolution to be used on a car. Every one I have seen so far gives you a low-res low-FPS image, because there just isn’t enough long-wave IR falling into the lens.
You know, on any camera you have to balance exposure time and noise/resolution with the amount of light getting into the lens. If the amount of light decreases, you have to either take longer exposures (->lower FPS), decrease the resolution (so that more light falls onto one pixel), or increase the ISO, thereby increasing noise. Or increase the lens diameter, but that’s not always an option.
And since long-wave IR has super little “light”, I didn’t think the result would work for cars, which do need a decent amount of resolution, high FPS and low noise so that their image recognition algos aren’t confused.
Isn’t that true for humans as well? I know I find it harder to see children due to the small size and dark skinned people at night due to, you know, low contrast (especially if they are wearing dark clothes).
Human vision be racist and ageist
Ps: but yes, please do improve the algorithms
Maybe if we just, I dunno, funded more mass transit and made it more accessible? Hell, trains are way better at being automated than any single car.
That works in a city, it’s not viable to have mass transit in every place, you still need cars for total areas
Those areas don’t really have silly things like pedestrains, though. They’re also far too small of a market to design self-driving cars for.
There are areas that are not rural that need cars, because the public transit sucks.
There’s no fast way to go to San Jose where my friend lives from Sunnyvale where I’m staying.
Walking is 3 hours, but walking to a train stop and then walking from the train stop would be about 2 hours. Buses don’t connect well either, so it’s still like 2 hours after you do all the transfers.
Or I could pay $17 for a Lyft and make it there in 20 minutes.
Yes, public transit should be better in the suburbs, but you’re talking about a very large SF bay area that needs better connections from everywhere to everywhere
Yes, but also improve kid and dark skin people detection tools, they don’t work just for driving cars. Efficient, fast and accurate people detection and tracking tools can be used in other myriad of stuff.
Imagine a system that tracks the amount of people in different sections of the store, a system that checks the amount of people going in and out of stores to control how many are inside… There’s a lot of tools that already do this, but and they works somewhat reliably, but they can be improved, and the models being developed for cars will then be reused. I+D is a good thing.
The trains in California are trash. I’d love to see good ones, but this isn’t even a thought in the heads of those who run things.
Dreaming is nice… But reality sucks, and we need to deal with it. Self driving cars are a wonderful answer, but Tesla, is fucking it up for everyone.
Strongly disagree. Trains are nice everywhere in the world. There’s no reason they can’t be nice in the US. Cars are trash. Strip malls are trash. Giant parking lots are trash. The sky high cost of cars is trash. The environmental impact of cars is trash. The danger of cars is trash. Car centric urban planning is trash.
Self-driving cars are safer… than the most dangerous thing ever. But because cars are inherently so dangerous, they are still more dangerous than just about any other mode of transportation.
Dreaming is nice, but that’s all self-driving cars are right now. I don’t see why we don’t have better dreams.
Chiming in from Seattle, we just built light rail up here and it’s just awful how slow they made it. It has its own track… It’s insane that it’s slower than driving in traffic. But they wanted to serve every neighborhood possible instead of realizing trains are not a last mile solution unless you build cities specifically around it.
Trains in California suck because of government dysfunction across all levels. At the municipal level, you can’t build shit because every city is actually an agglomeration of hundreds of tiny municipalities that all squabble with each other. At the regional level, you get NIMBYism that doesn’t want silly things like trains knocking down property values… And these people have a voice, because democracy I guess (despite there being a far larger group of people that would love to have trains). At the state level, you have complete funding mismanagement and project management malfeasance that makes projects both incredibly expensive and developed with no forethought whatsoever (Caltrain has how many at-grade crossings, again?).
This isn’t a train problem, it’s a problem with your piss-poor government. At least crime is down, right?
DRIVERLESS CARS: We killed them. We killed them all. They’re dead, every single one of them. And not just the pedestmen, but the pedestwomen and the pedestchildren, too. We slaughtered them like animals. We hate them!
