Easy solution is to enforce a buddy system. For every black person walking alone at night must accompanied by a white person. /s
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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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
Part of the children problem is distinguishing between 'small' and 'far away'. Humans seem reasonably good at it, but from what I've seen AIs aren't there yet.
Yeah This probably accounts for 90% of the issue.
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.
Would you be willing to share some neato stuff about your job with us?
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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.
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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!
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
Tesla removed the LiDAR from their cars, a step backwards if you ask me.
Seems like Tesla is really not going to be the market leader on this. IDK if anytime else caught those videos by the self driving tech expert going through all the ways Tesla is bullshitting about it.
Hey, they'll have full self driving tech next year!
Source: Elon Musk, every year, for like the last ten years.
I think many driverless car companies insist on only using cameras. I guess lidars/radars are expensive.
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.
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.
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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?
Self driving cars are republicans?
Built by them, inherited their biases.
They just want to do abortions on the road. Just a few years after birth.
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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.
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...
In this case it's likely partly a signal to noise problem that can't be mitigated easily. Both children and dark skinned people produce less signal to a camera because they reflect less light. children because they're smaller, and dark skinned people because their skin tones are darker. This will cause issues in the stereo vision algorithms that are finding objects and getting distance to them. Lidar would solve the issue, but companies don't want to use it because lidars with a fast enough update rate and high enough resolution for safe highway driving are prohibitively expensive for a passenger vehicle (60k+ for just the sensor)
Darker toned people are harder to detect because they reflect less light. The tiny cheap sensors on cameras do not have enough aperture for lower light detections. It's not training that's the problem it's hardware.
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.
Visible light is racist.
Visible light: (͡•_ ͡• )
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A single flir camera would help massively. They don't care about colour or height. Only temperature.
I could make a warm water balloon in the shape of a human and it would stop the car then. Maybe a combination of all various types of technologies? You'd still have to train the model on all various kinds of humans though.
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?
They need to safely ignore shadows, oil stains on the road, just because there's contrast on an image doesn't mean it's an object.
Sure but why on earth are we relying on cameras to drive cars? Many modern cars have radar, which is far more reliable.
Natural vision is awesome, it works for billions of humans. We just have nothing close to what the human eyes and brain offers in terms of tech in that spectrum.
I think it needs to be a combination of sensors since radar sucks in the rain/snow/fog.
Cameras and image recognition are cheaper than LIDAR/RADAR, so Tesla uses it exclusively.
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#blacklivesmatter
Damn ageist AI!
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