Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says
Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says
New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
Humans have the same problem, so it's not surprising.
Yeah, this is a dumb article. There is something to be said about biased training data, but my guess is that it's just harder to see people who are smaller and who have darker skin. It has nothing to do with training data and just has the same issues our eyes do. There is something to be said about Tesla using only regular cameras instead of Lidar, which I don't think would have any difference based on skin tone, but smaller things will always be harder to see.
I can spot kids and dark skinned people pretty well
Seems this will be always the case. Small objects are harder to detect than larger objects. Higher contrast objects are easier to detect than lower contrast objects. Even if detection gets 1000x better, these cases will still be true. Do you introduce artificial error to make things fair?
Repeating the same comment from a crosspost.
All the more reason to take this seriously and not disregard it as an implementation detail.
When we, as a society, ask: Are autonomous vehicles safe enough yet?
That’s not the whole question.
…safe enough for whom?
Can everyone who feels the need to jog at twilight hours please wear bring colors? I get anxiety driving to my suburban friends.
They should. But also, good. You should absolutely feel anxiety operating a multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. Even if everybody was super diligent about making themselves visible, there would still be the off cases. Someone's boss held them late and they missed the last bus so now they need to walk home in the dark when they dressed expecting to ride home in the day. Someone is down on their luck and needs to get to the nearest homeless resource and doesn't have access to bright clothes. Drivers should never feel comfortable that obstacles will always be reflective and bright. Our transportation infrastructure should not be built to lull them into that false sense of comfort.
I wonder what the baseline is for the average driver spotting those same people? I expect it's higher than the learning algo but by how much?
Agest and racist cars?
They touch on this topic in Cars 2.
Italian fork lift pit crew FTW!
More like programmers who didn’t consider putting in more folks that don’t look like them in the training datasets. Unconscious bias strikes again.
I would say it's because dark stuff on dark background is harder to detect than other way around. Roads are dark, shadows are dark, pavement is sometimes dark, houses are quite often dark, so it blends.
I'd rather call for more powerful algorithms than bigger data sets.
Misleading title?
How so?
because proper driverless cares properly use LIDAR, which doesn't give a shit about your skin color.
And can easily see an object the size of a child out to many metres in front, and doesn't give a shit if its a child or not. It's an object in the path or object with a vector that will about to be in the path.
So change 'Driverless Cars" to "Elon's poor implementation of a Driverless Car"
Or better yet..
"Camera only AI-powered pedestrian detection systems" are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People
First impression I got is driverless cars are worst at detecting kids and black people than drivers
WEIRD bias strikes again.
A stealth bomber gives less signal because of angles and materials and how they interact with radar, not because they are small or painted a dark color.
If a dark skinned person and a white skinned person are both wearing the same pants and long sleeved shirts, why would skin color be a factor beyond some kind of poorly implemented face recognition software like auto focus on cameras that also don't work well for dark skinned folks? Especially when some of the object recognition is just looking for things in the way, not necessarily people.
No, it is not some simple explanation based on people's eyes from the driver's seat while driving in the dark. It is a result of the systems being trained based on white adults (probably men based on most medical and tech trials) instead of being trained on a comprehensive data set that represents the actual population.
Except that’s not the source of this problem. AI can be great at detecting patterns with little data, if it’s properly trained. But this article is clear that the reason of this failure is in the lack of training data. This means that the AI never learned kids and dark-skinned people exist and it’s unreliable in detecting them.
It is easier to see dark object on bright background.
That's only part of it though. This issue is almost as old as we have had similar image/facial recognition technologies. Data is where models get their conclusions from.
Yes but isn’t it easier to say RACISM
It's not a discriminatory bias
You don’t know that.
Speaking as someone who inherited a computer vision codebase from Asian devs and quickly found that it didn’t work on white skin…
Implementation decisions matter, and those decisions will always be biased towards demonstrating successful output for the people who plan, bankroll, and labor on the project.
How much of the 20% or 7.5% difference in detection is due purely to inevitable drawbacks of size and skin tone?
Who knows.
What we do know is that we did measure a difference, and we do live in a culture where we’re more likely to hear a CEO say:
“It works!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for children and black people.”
rather than:
“It doesn’t work!” …and then see an article months later that adds “…except for adults and white people.”
And that fact means we should seriously consider whether our attention (and intention) is being fairly applied here.
Wow. that’s all kinds of incorrect
It’s not a discriminatory bias or even one that can really have anything done about it.
It is absolutely data training bias. Whether it is the data that ML was trained on or the data that programmers were trained on is irrelevant. This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that a human is a human
It’s purely physics.
It is not. See below:
Is it harder to track smaller objects or larger ones?
No, not if the scale of your hardware is correct. A 3’ tall human may be smaller than a 6’ one, but it is larger than a 10” traffic light lens or a 30” stop sign. The systems do not have quite as much trouble recognizing those smaller objects. This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.
Is it harder for an optical system to track something darker. In any natural scene.
Also no. If that were the case, then we would have problems with collision bias against darker vehicles, or not being able to recognize the black asphalt of the road. Optical systems do not rely on the absolute signal strength of an object. they rely on contrast. A darker skin tone would only have low contrast against a background with a similar shade, and that doesn’t even account for clothing which usually covers most of a persons body. Again, this is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.
smaller and darker individuals have less signal. Less signal means lower probability of detection,
No, they have different signals. that signal needs to be compared to the background to determine whether it exists and where it is, and then compared to the dataset to determine what it is. This is still a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.
It’s the same reason a stealth bomber is harder to track than a passenger plane. Less signal.
Close, but not quite.
This is a problem of the computer not recognizing that the human is a human.
You sound like an imaging specialist with no experience
I’m sure that will be of great comfort to any dark-skinned person or child that gets hit.
If those are known, expected issues? Then they had better program around it before putting driverless cars out on the road where dark-skinned people and children are not theoreticals but realities.
Okay but being better able to detect X doesn't mean you are unable to detect Y well enough. I'd say the physical attributes of children and dark-skinned people would make it more difficult for people to see objects as well, under many conditions. But that doesn't require a news article.
But that doesn’t require a news article.
Most things I read on the Fediverse don't.
Elon, probably: "Go be young and black somewhere else"
Those types of people are the ones who Elon Musk calls "acceptable losses."
What about hairy people? Hope cars won't think I'm a racoon and goes grill time!
Lmao
Unfortunate but not shocking to be honest.
Only recently did smartphone cameras get better at detecting darker skinned faces in software, and that was something they were probably working towards for a decent while. Not all that surprising that other camera tech would have to play catch up in that regard as well.
This is Lemmy, so immediately 1/2 the people here are ready to be race-baited and want to cry RaCiSm1!!1!!
This place is just as bad as Reddit. Sometimes it's like being on r/Politics. I'm not sure why they left if they just brought the hyper political toxicity with them.
I'd go so far as to claim that sometimes it is worse than Reddit. Sometimes.
Not racism, but definitely (unconscious) bias of the researchers
Apparently nighttime and black people are both dark in color. Nobody thought to tell the cameras or the software this information.
Built by Republican engineers.
I've seen this episode of Better Off Ted.
That show ended too soon.
One reason why diversity in the workplace is necessary. Most of the country is not 40 year old white men so products need to be made with a more diverse crowd in mind.