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.
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?
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.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I know about all that, I just thought it meant active infrared lighted cameras. So basically, an IR light on the car, illuminating the road ahead, and then just using a near-IR camera like a regular optical camera.
I didn’t think it meant a far-IR camera passively filming black body radiation, because I thought the resolution (both spacially and temporally) of these cameras is usually really low. Didn’t think they were fast and high-res enough to be used on cars.
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.
Ya hear that Elno?
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
Yeah This probably accounts for 90% of the issue.
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.
I think you’re misunderstanding what the article is saying.
You’re correct that it isn’t the job of a system to detect someone’s skin color, and judge those people by it.
But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.
They staff are designing the AVs to safely navigate in a world of people like them, but when the staff are overwhelmingly male, light skinned, young and single, and urban, and in the United States, a lot of considerations don’t even cross their minds.
Will the AVs recognize female pedestrians?
Do the sensors sense light spectrum wide enough to detect dark skinned people?
Will the AVs recognize someone with a walker or in a wheelchair, or some other mobility device?
Toddlers are small and unpredictable.
Bicyclists can fall over at any moment.
Are all these AVs being tested in cities being exposed to all the animals they might encounter in rural areas like sheep, llamas, otters, alligators and other animals who might be in the road?
How well will AVs tested in urban areas fare on twisty mountain roads that suddenly change from multi lane asphalt to narrow twisty dirt roads?
Will they recognize tractors and other farm or industrial vehicles on the road?
Will they recognize something you only encounter in a foreign country like an elephant or an orangutan or a rickshaw? Or what’s it going to do if it comes across that tomato festival in Spain?
Engineering isn’t magical: It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and recorded knowledge of what works and doesn’t work.
Releasing AVs on the entire world without testing them on every little thing they might encounter is just asking for trouble.
What’s required for safe driving without human intelligence is more mind boggling the more you think about it.
But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.
No, it isn’t. Its a product of the fact that dark people are darker and children are smaller. Human drivers have a harder time seeing these individuals too. They literally send less data to the camera sensor. This is why people wear reflective vests for safety at night, and ninjas dress in black.
This is true but tesla and others could compensate for this by spending more time and money training on those form factors, something humans can’t really do. It’s an opportunity for them to prove the superhuman capabilities of their systems.
That doesn’t make it better.
It doesn’t matter why they are bad at detecting X, it should be improved regardless.
Also maybe Lidarr would be a better idea.
They literally send less data to the camera sensor.
So maybe let’s not limit ourselves to using hardware which cannot easily differentiate when there is other hardware, or combinations of hardware, which can do a better job at it?
Humans can’t really get better eyes, but we can use more appropriate hardware in machines to accomplish the task.
That is true. I almost hit a dark guy, wearing black, who was crossing a street at night with no streetlight as I turned into it. Almost gave me a heart attack. It is bad enough almost getting hit, as a white guy, when I cross a street with a streetlight.
These are important questions, but addressing them for each model built independently and optimizing for a low “racial bias” is the wrong approach.
In academia we have reference datasets that serve as standard benchmarks for data driven prediction models like pedestrian detection. The numbers obtained on these datasets are usually the referentials used when comparing different models. By building comprehensive datasets we get models that work well across a multitude of scenarios.
Those are all good questions, but need to be addressed when building such datasets. And whether model M performs X% better to detect people of that skin color is not relevant, as long as the error rate of any skin color is not out of an acceptable rate.
The media has become ridiculously racist, they go out of their way to make every incident appear to be racial now
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 think many driverless car companies insist on only using cameras. I guess lidars/radars are expensive.
They’re basically the only one. Even MobilEye, who is objectively the best in the ADAS/AV space for computer vision, uses other sensors in their fleet. They have demonstrated camera only autonomy, but realize it’s not worth the $1000 in sensors to risk killing people.
Even Comma.AI, which is vision-only internally, still implicitly relies on the cars built in radar for collision detection and blind spot monitoring. It’s just Tesla.
To be fair, that’s because most cars aren’t equipped with cameras for blind spot detection.
Thats because cameras aren’t good for blind spot detection. Moreover, even for cars that have cameras on the side, the Comma doesn’t use them. AFAIK, in my car with 360 cameras, the OEM system doesn’t use the cameras either for blind spot.
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.
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No it’s because they train AI with pictures of white adults.
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It literally wouldn’t matter for lidar, but Tesla uses visual cameras to save money and that weighs down everyone else’s metrics.
Lumping lidar cars with Tesla makes no sense
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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?
Not necessarily worse than humans, no, just worse than it can detect light skinned and tall people.
Your proving their point. That’s Tesla, the one run by an edgy, narcissistic, billionaire asshole, not the companies with better tech under (and above, in this case) the hood.
All I am saying is that the article doesn’t attempt to make any comparison between human’s and AI’s ability to detect dark skinned people or children… the “worse” mentioned in the poorly worded (misleading) headline was comparing the detection rates of AI only.
2020 was lockdown year, how on earth have accidents increased in the US?
Any black people or children in your ‘study’?
Self driving cars are republicans?
What? No. They’d need to recognise them better - otherwise how can they swerve to make sure they hit them?
Built by them, inherited their biases.
They just want to do abortions on the road. Just a few years after birth.
Im not expert, but perhaps thermal camera + lidar sensor could help.
It’s amazing Elon hasn’t figured this out. Then again, Steve Jobs said no iPhone would ever have an OLED screen.
We should just assume CEO’s are stupid at this point. Seriously. It’s a very common trend we all keep seeing. If they prove otherwise, then that’s great! But let’s start them at “dumbass” and move forward from there.
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.
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.
They need Google Pixel cameras.
Damn ageist AI!
Racist lighting!
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.
Yes, the issue is the data used to teach the systems that people look like are biased towards white men most likely.
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.
