Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists

Easy solution is to enforce a buddy system. For every black person walking alone at night must accompanied by a white person. /s

LiDAR doesn’t see skin color or age. Radar doesn’t either. Infra-red doesn’t either.

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.

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!

I hate all this bias bullshit because it makes the problem bigger than it actually is and passes the wrong idea to the general public.

A pedestrian detection system shouldn't have as its goal to detect skin tones and different pedestrian sizes equally. There's no benefit in that. It should do the best it can to reduce the false negative rates of pedestrian detection regardless, and hopefully do better than human drivers in the majority of scenarios. The error rates will be different due to the very nature of the task, and that's ok.

This is what actually happens during research for the most part, but the media loves to stir some polarization and the public gives their clicks. Pushing for a "reduced bias model" is actually detrimental to the overall performance, because it incentivizes development of models that perform worse in scenarios they could have an edge just to serve an artificial demand for reduced bias.

Wouldn't good driverless cars use radars or lidars or whatever? Seems like the biggest issue here is that darker skin tones are harder for cameras to see

I'm sick of the implication that computer programmers are intentionally or unintentionally adding racial bias to AI systems. As if a massive percentage of software developers in NA aren't people of color. When can we have the discussion where we talk about how photosensitive technology and contrast ratio works?

The study only used images and the image recognition system, so this will only be accurate for self driving systems that operate purely on image recognition. The only one that does that currently is Tesla AFAIK.

This has been the case with pretty much every single piece of computer-vision software to ever exist....

Darker individuals blend into dark backgrounds better than lighter skinned individuals. Dark backgrounds are more common that light ones, ie; the absence of sufficient light is more common than 24/7 well-lit environments.

Obviously computer vision will struggle more with darker individuals.

Worse than humans?!

I find that very hard to believe.

We consider it the cost of doing business, but self-driving cars have an obscenely low bar to surpass us in terms of safety. The biggest hurdle it has to climb is accounting for irrational human drivers and other irrational humans diving into traffic that even the rare decent human driver can't always account for.

American human drivers kill more people than 10 9/11s worth of people every year. Id rather modernizing and automating our roadways would be a moonshot national endeavor, but we don't do that here anymore, so we complain when the incompetent, narcissistic asshole who claimed the project for private profit turned out to be an incompetent, narcissistic asshole.

The tech is inevitable, there are no physics or computational power limitations standing in our way to achieve it, we just lack the will to be a society (that means funding stuff together through taxation) and do it.

Let's just trust another billionaire do it for us and act in the best interests of society though, that's been working just gangbusters, hasn't it?

Self driving cars are republicans?

Weird question, but why does a car need to know if it's a person or not? Like regardless of if it's a person or a car or a pole, maybe don't drive into it?

Is it about predicting whether it's going to move into your path? Well can't you just just LIDAR to detect an object moving and predict the path, why does it matter if it's a person?

Is it about trolley probleming situations so it picks a pole instead of a person if it can't avoid a crash?

Probably could have stopped that headline at the third word.

I'd assume that's either due to bias in the training set, or poor design choices. The former is already a big problem in facial recognition, and can't really be fixed unless we update datasets. With the latter, this could be using things like visible light for classification, where the contrast between target and background won't necessarily be the same for all skin tones and times os day. Cars aren't limited by DNA to only grow a specific type of eye, and you can still create training data from things like infrared or LIDAR. In either case though, it goes to show how important it is to test for bias in datasets and deal with it before actually deploying anything...

Im not expert, but perhaps thermal camera + lidar sensor could help.

A single flir camera would help massively. They don't care about colour or height. Only temperature.

cars should be tested for safety in collisions with children and it should affect their safety rating and taxes. Driverless equipment shouldn't be allowed on the road until these sorts of issues are resolved.

They need Google Pixel cameras.

Damn ageist AI!

Ya know, I am not surprised that even self driving cars somehow ended up with the case of accidental racism and wanting to murder children. Even though this is a serious issue, it's still kinda funny in a messed up way.

Okay? It's not like these systems are actually intelligent. Anything different from the majority of cases is going to be at an inherent disadvantage in being detected, right? At the volume of data used for their models, surely it's just a matter of statistics.

Maybe I'm wrong (and I'm surely using the wrong terminology), but it seems like that must be the case. It's not some issue of human racial bias, just a bias based on relative population. Or is my understanding that flawed?

Mind you, I'm not saying it doesn't need to be remedied posthaste.

#blacklivesmatter

This is kinda why I dislike cars and self driving cars. Self driving cars are made more and more cost effective with compromises to safety. I feel like the US needs to mandate lidar on anything that has driver assist features. Self driving cars have been in the grey area for too long.

It's almost like less contrast against a black road or smaller targets are computationally more difficult to detect or something! Weird! How about instead of this pretty clear fact, we get outraged and claim it's racism or something! Yeah!!

Pretty sure Teslas target kids.