Deep Learning Identifies Wet Road Hazards From Sound Input (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Researches have used recurrent neural network architecture to develop an audio-interpretation system that can understand how wet a road is, using techniques more commonly employed in speech recognition and music analysis. Every year 384,032 persons are injured and 4,789 persons killed through wet roads, and it's a problem that also threatens to hamper the usefulness of self-driving cars, which are likely to either become dangerous or prohibitively cautious in the absence of good information about the safety of road surfaces.

Comments

Re:It's more people than that

[bickerdyke]

Don't know for sure, but elsewhere people would probably just notice that the road is wet after a rainfall and drive accordingly?

How many of those 384,032 people sued because no one put up a yellow "Caution! Wet Floor" sign?

Killled by wet roads?

[fred911]

" Every year 384,032 persons are injured and 4,789 persons killed through wet roads" should read:

  Every year 384,032 persons are injured and 4,789 persons killed through wet roads and their inability to grasp the concepts of friction and velocity.

  Or: ...are killed because of their piss poor driving skills.

Re:Killled by wet roads?

[RogueyWon]

Indeed. About five years ago, my then-next-door neighbours' son was seriously hurt (and left with long-term life-changing injuries) in a crash a few months after passing his driving test. He wasn't breaking the speed-limit at the time - he was bang on 40mph on a road with a 40mph limit - but he had tried taking a bend that he should have been slowing for even in good road conditions without slowing - just after a short, sharp rain-shower when the road was extremely slippery. Result - he went off the road and into a tree at 40mph.

I think part of the issue is that a lot of the advances in car technology that have made motoring safer and easier under most conditions have also served to insulate drivers from the reality of what they are doing; controlling a powerful, heavy metal object whose connection to the road comes through four small strips of rubber.

Here in the UK, you can legally learn to drive from age 17. Learning and passing a test generally requires several months (we have arguably the toughest driving test in the world, which is unsurprising as we also have more cars per mile of road than any other country on Earth). One trick I've recommended to parents a number of times over the years is that they might want to consider, as a "treat" for their newly-driving offspring, one of those "rally days" you can pay for, which includes a few hours instruction in loose-gravel driving, plus the opportunity to try it out for several hours.

Based on both personal and observed experience, there is absolutely nothing as effective as throwing a car with no power steering, no traction control and no ABS around a loose gravel surface at teaching the driver just how scary some of the forces he or she is playing with can be. Doing 40mph on tarmac in a modern road car feels positively sedate under most circumstances. Doing 40mpgh in a rattling bare-bones car on a surface which provides very little grip feels very different. An intelligent 17 year old should be able to carry that knowledge across into driving on wet tarmac.

And no, video games, no matter how realistic, are not a substitute. You need to feel the weight of the car and the power of the engine through the steering column, or the lesson just doesn't work.

Re:Killled by wet roads?

[Viol8]

"Even race car drivers still crash."

Race car drivers are paid to take their vehicles to the limit of control. Normal drivers are told not to on many occasions but a lot just don't listen.

Re:It's more people than that

[Z00L00K]

Wet roads comes in many variants, from the simple thin layer that only lowers the friction a little to deep trenches and pools that catches the cars and throws them offtrack and then to the black ice with a wet surface that looks just like an ordinary wet road but has almost no friction at all and causes really dangerous situations because the road can transit from being just wet to being black ice in an instant.

Re:It's more people than that

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not just that: a wet road after a mild shower doesn't have to be a problem in spring or fall, but the exact same shower in summer after a long dry spell can turn the road into a slippery slide, when the rubber and other crap that's been accumulating on the surface gets wet.

Re:It's more people than that

[tinkerton]

Concrete an rough tarmac can be very predictable. Dirt, water, it just always grips. Smooth tarmac can easily get slippery even when dry.

The thing is drivers are more and more reduced to slow video game drivers. They just point the steering wheel. The net result is less accidents but the decrease in skill is dramatic. So is the decrease in attention i think. So the improvement in safety is partially cancelled because 'all other things being equal' does not apply.

Re:It's more people than that

[avandesande]

It is from the oil on the road that floats when it rains after a long dry spell. It isn't nearly as big a problem as it used to be, I think in general new cars tend to be less leaky. You would be amazed at the amount of research that has gone into gaskets.