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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 560 points –
Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists
kcl.ac.uk

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.

117

You are viewing a single comment

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.

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.

Would you be willing to share some neato stuff about your job with us?