One good bit of news is that I can confidently predict that at least they don't follow the sizeism of our society, and are likely able to detect larger people more easily than skinnier.
Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#72It 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 think what you're trying to say is cars will start identifying folks and logging their location. Cell tracking/triangulation data is already available from cell companies. Self driving cars aren't going to make things worse.
Optimistic to think that having more ways to track people won't make things worse.
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#73they're testing 8 different detection algorithms > The detection systems were 19.67% more likely to detect adults than children, and 7.52% more likely to detect people with lighter skin tones than people with darker skin tones, according to the study. while they all had a harder time with adults vs children, that 7.52% is gotten by averaging 2 algorithms that performed abysmally, with 6 that had no statistically sign…
Are these pedestrian detection models in use in any widely-deployed commercial self-driving car? Is there a limitation since these are images rather than videos? I would've expected these to be addressed in the "Threats to Validity." There is also no control comparison to humans, beyond the two annotators. Are these detectors significantly worse than humans?
There is telling whether these results are valid or applicable at all, but they purport that there are statistically significant unfairness based on gender and skin color. At best, this feels misleading.
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#74If skin colors differ how can you possibly expect to obtain the same result?
LIDAR
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#75How do they work in winter then? You can't see much skin if someone is wearing a winter coat. Right - self driving cars are a solution for Silicon Valley only only so they don't even bother testing those cars elsewhere.
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…
> This has been an issue for more than ten years
Yes
> Surely someone has started adding various skin colors into the training data.
What has to occur for this to happen:
* Someone has to take the time and effort to measure things, to identify that there is a problem.
* They have to get that message out so that it's heard.
* That message needs to:
* hit the public hard enough that people demand intervention from their elected representatives
* or, alert the company directly, and hope that the incentives align. (Will the company make more money by fixing this?)
* Call the problem too hard to solve
* Call it bad science
* Call it ragebait
* Call it woke
* Make up a bunch of equivalences and channel it into inertia:
* If people are wearing winter coats, then they won't show enough skin for the cars to be racist. And if the cars aren't racist in cold places, then it isn't a problem in warm places.
* People don't have radar/lidar either, and they're allowed to driveRe: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#76To be fair, human drivers would likely have the same problem given seating position in cars & certain lighting conditions..
Can confirm to some degree. I had one dark skinned kid in dark clothes casually crossing the road in front of me during the dark months here were I live. I didn't have to slam the brakes or anything because it was a bit ahead of me, bit it was scary because of how hard it was to detect.
To be fair, in cool or cold weather, a pedestrian can easily have little or so visible skin — long sleeves, hair, and possibly a hat of any sort can hide skin very well.
Pedestrians (and cyclists) should wear bright clothing and/or retroreflectors at night! (Ideally both. Retroreflectors are mostly useless if a car has its lights off.)
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#77>This is due to bias in open-source AI, on which self-driving cars rely, researchers say. Or they are simply less visible.
You mean, to all possible sensors and spectrum signals in the arsenal?
Pretty sure they are discussing 3-band cameras between 400nm and 700nm (roughly). If we start adding multi-spectral or hyper-spectral cameras to the mix then you'd have a lot more information to use, but then you'd have a lost more information to process.
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree that they are different, but if I read the comment you responded to charitably, it's pointing out that the bar often seems unreasonably high for self driving. Human drivers are terrible leading to ~100 deaths/day in the US. How much better does self-driving need to be in order to make it worthwhile? Does it have to be perfect?
The government mandates adding rear view cameras to all cars at a cost of like $1 million dollars per life saved.
There is no rational basis for vehicle safety standards and the outcomes (deaths per passenger mile) show that we are doing a horrible job at it.
Regulating the addition of LIDAR based object detection to all vehicles will have no basis in safety until domestic manufacturers can't compete with imports and they need another expensive component to tack on to every car to narrow the price gap in their incompetence to compete globally. Then there will be a PR campaign, funded by Detroit, about how necessary it is for "safety" to add LIDAR or whatever to every car.
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm to some degree. I had one dark skinned kid in dark clothes casually crossing the road in front of me during the dark months here were I live. I didn't have to slam the brakes or anything because it was a bit ahead of me, bit it was scary because of how hard it was to detect.
To be fair, in cool or cold weather, a pedestrian can easily have little or so visible skin — long sleeves, hair, and possibly a hat of any sort can hide skin very well. Pedestrians (and cyclists) should wear bright clothing and/or retroreflectors at night! (Ideally both. Retroreflectors are mostly useless if a car has its lights off.)
Around here you get a fine if you drive with the lights off, even in the summer.
Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Snow clearers always destroy road markers. Every summer where I live they have to be repainted. So this would suck.
Honestly, why don’t we just install magnetic or some other type of “tracks” in roads to help cars work like trains ?