61–70 of 92 posts
It won't be long till they won't just be detecting people, by identifying specifically which people they are. Think of the data! All those cars logging time/location of all those people. (which, of course, will only be used for good and the occasional targeted ad)
I am a big fan of Scandinavian style pedestrian safety reflectors. Attach one to your bag or jacket if you are walking late at night; it might save your life. But if you don't have a reflector, wear at least one piece of bright, light-colored clothing; this is particularly important it your skin color is dark!
It's almost as if the media is looking for racism in everything
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The skin color is going to be the least of your issues in the winter time. How are the cars going to "see" the road under 10cm of snow? Granted humans shouldn't really be driving in those conditions either, but we do and mostly successfully, to avoid sleeping on the side of the road in -10C. What is it that makes it so hard for all these algorithms to work on people with darker skin? This has been an issue for more t…
My employer makes a multi-band synthetic aperture radar that penetrate snow and is high-resolution enough to "see" painted road markings and reflectors beneath a layer of snow. It is nowhere near small or cheap enough for self-driving car applications, but will be one day. Another challenge is affordable real-time processing of the data. Churning through 3,200MB/s of phase-history data is expensive but again that wil…
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The point of the article, to me, is computer vision will never be enough. These are machines and need to be augmented with radar and other object detection methods.
Radar etc. almost certainly make it easier, but for it to be "never" this would also have to be provably impossible for humans. Which isn't too say it's not never, as I remember studies in my own childhood that said human drivers were also bad at recognising how far away children were, and I've never heard of human perception of skin colour being tested in this way so it might just turn out that melanin is unfortunat…
There is a discussion we could have whether we want to measure self-driving cars against an ideal perfect baseline or against the status quo. But of course the ideal case is much easier to define, and has fewer things that make some people uncomfortable.
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Do you have lidar and radar when you drive? Should it be illegal for you to drive without those things?
What is it with people on this website (not specifically the user I’m replying to) and going with "the computer vaguely does the thing the human does, literally what's the difference???" (or similar) as an argument/gotcha/etc. around ML/AI/self-driving/...? It’s painfully obvious that the computer and the human are different systems that process information differently and therefore likely need different sets of inpu…
Does this mean current systems require this or that? Nope, but making the claim that all systems must be equipped with a certain technology seems short sighted, particularly when the proven counter example is putting a few million miles on the road every day.
The way I read it is something like this...
Some researchers got their hands on software that purports to do similar stuff to what self driving cars might also do, but crucially isn't the same as what the cars actually use, and then extrapolate the results into the headline-like title of the research paper: "Dark-Skin Individuals Are at More Risk on the Street: Unmasking Fairness Issues of Autonomous Driving Systems". That's justified isn't it? After all, all software in a category is more or less the same program and the car company software and their research subject software all runs on computers? Right? Must be valid... clearly you can make factual assertions on that kind of extrapolation about computer systems and software.
Then some bright-eyed-bushy-tailed reporter comes along and applies the criticality of the typical college educated/professional journalist, which is to say they carefully considered the headline they could write, but otherwise just took the word of the researchers that something resembling knowledge was actually gained by the study. News is delivered! Job done!
Look, sarcasm aside, could I have read/understood things incorrectly? Sure... I'm not an expert in this field. Could this be a problem in production-used-in-the-real-world pedestrian detection systems? Sure. But insofar as I can tell, the best the paper could be telling us is that racial biases in pedestrian detection systems is a viable possibility: not the assertion that "Dark-Skin Individuals Are at More Risk on the Street". It might be true, but I don't think these researchers know that any better than I do. Of course, "Dark-Skin Individuals Could Be at More Risk on the Street" isn't nearly so catchy or attention grabbing, is it?
And who knows... maybe this research team should pick up the search for low temperature/low pressure super-conductivity... sounds like they have the right temperament.
It won't be long till they won't just be detecting people, by identifying specifically which people they are. Think of the data! All those cars logging time/location of all those people. (which, of course, will only be used for good and the occasional targeted ad)
Buddy, you're commenting on an article showing that cars aren't even that good at identifying people as people .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radar etc. almost certainly make it easier, but for it to be "never" this would also have to be provably impossible for humans. Which isn't too say it's not never, as I remember studies in my own childhood that said human drivers were also bad at recognising how far away children were, and I've never heard of human perception of skin colour being tested in this way so it might just turn out that melanin is unfortunat…
I'm confident that a comprehensive study would show that on average humans are worse at detecting people of color against dark backgrounds (if we agree this is code for "people with highly pigmented skin" and not Asians or Latinos). There is just much less contrast to work with, and dark skin also makes facial features stand out less (which is an issue because faces are the thing humans can recognize best). There is…