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Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often, Study Finds (futurism.com)
According to a new paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology, autonomous cars could disproportionately endanger pedestrians with darker skin, a troubling sign of how AI can inadvertently reproduce prejudices from the wider world. Futurism reports: [In the paper, the researchers] detail their investigation of eight AI models used in state-of-the-art object detection systems. These are the systems that allow autonomous vehicles to recognize road signs, pedestrians, and other objects. They tested these models using images of pedestrians divided into two categories based on their score on the Fitzpatrick scale, which is commonly used to classify human skin color. According to the researchers' paper, the models exhibited "uniformly poorer performance" when confronted with pedestrians with the three darkest shades on the scale. On average, the models' accuracy decreased by 5 percent when examining the group containing images of pedestrians with darker skin tones, even when the researchers accounted for variables such as whether the photo was taken during the day or at night. Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images.
This is not true at all, it's based on false assumptions.
First of all, most self driving cars will end up using LIDAR. Skin color, not an issue.
Secondly. even cars with cameras do a lot of image transformations such that color is usually disposed of. You kin color is irrelevant to a recognizer looking for human forms.
In fact you could argue that during the day, darker skin is an advantage because against a blue sky it's more noticeable than really pale skin which could look like clouds... #GingerLivesMatter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"may" and "finds" don't belong together. You can't promote a 'maybe' to a 'definitely' in the same sentence.
Only if the dark-skinned person is running around naked at night.
So the anorexic may be hit by self-driving cars more often. On the other hand, fugitives from jails in their vertical striped uniforms may be in grave danger near crosswalk signs. While the hypertonic will survive more often, their red faces being interpreted as red traffic lights.
So much prejudice to consider!
If the glaring sun is behind you at sunrise, you'll be hit too. The laws of physics are not selective.
This is officially the most snowflake story I have ever seen on SlashDot. Are you serious? Good grief, you kids all need to be spanked. Also: 'self-driving' cars hit any people they hit because *the tech doesn't work*. And it never will.
I looked at the actual article, and the article it references - and they're all short tabloid blabs without any link to the full article.
Nothing obvious showing up on Georgia Institute of Technology's websites.
Like with most reports on early reporting on scientific studies, it helps to see what the actual text says - reporters have a tendency to, well, sensationalize findings to meet their own needs.
Ryan Fenton
How about people wearing all black? Are ninja's safe? Will stage workers get run over on the way to their cars after the show?
How much skin was showing in the images? Were these streakers or people wearing blaze orange hunting parkas? Can just a face cause this issue if their hands are in the pockets of their parka?
Shouldn't these cars be avoiding things in the road in general? Say deer, pets, moose, etc?
Unless the study is done in winter, in Scandinavia, that is.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There aren't many black people where I live, and when I do encounter a black person, especially a very dark person, it is definitely more difficult at first to accurately read facial expressions.
This is probably a combination of my environment, my long relationship with my keyboard in a dark room, and a side order of actual physics (optics).
Before you die, you see the bling.
....because physics is racis.
-Styopa
Nothing would be said if it were that people wearing dark colored clothes and a hoody are more difficult to detect. And why wouldn't they just train these systems with all dark skinned people.
I think the clothing counts a lot more than the skin, given they cover most of the body of people.
Which means if you're a goth, self-driving cars are most likely to hit you.
Apparently I hate black people because I almost ran one down last night. He was wearing black, standing on the highway, and was waving his hands around. The only thing you could see of him before the headlights hit him was the tiny cell phone light in his hand.
Guy ran out of gas and was too poor to pay for a tow truck. Yeah I drove him to a gas station and wasn't murdered, nor did I kill him. But the internet says I hate black people since I've never almost ran over a white guy. Anyone one to volunteer so I can clear my reputation?
In my part of the world most people wear clothing. It doesn't matter what your skin color is when only 4% of your surface area is skin.
Unfortunately, most of those people wear dark clothing at night. Children and adults, male and female, pedestrians and bicyclists. Even fire engine red is almost indistinguishable from black at night. So, these people are at risk from motorists already. Self-driving cars are obviously not a concern of these people.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often
When I first read that, I wasn't sure if it was a statistic, or the latest executive order from the president.
When I first read it, I immediately thought of a Stupid Kid Joke(tm) learned way back in that weird era known as the 1970s.
Not giving the set up, just the punch line...
"No, but I got him with the gas can."
This space unintentionally left blank.
Oh no no no. The AI was trained correctly but then let its prejudice take over and decided for itself that it liked the idea of running over darker skinned people because it's racist.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1...
#DeleteFacebook
How about making self driving cars that don't hit any people at all? If a person to jumps in front of the car and gets hit, then the car was going to fast for that environment. Isn't this how it works with non self driving cars? In most situations I am aware of, if I hit a pedestrian, it was my fault. In the few situations I am not at fault, like jaywalking from behind a completely obstructed vantage point or a small child running under the car from a completely obstructed vantage point, I cannot imagine any vehicle stopping in time due to the nature of friction and rubber, no matter what color they are. What about dark deer? Dark turtles? Dark rocks? Potholes? Dark cardboard boxes with unknown contents? Are all these just run over?
Or is wearing dark clothing. On an unlit road near here, nearly smeared a group of teens (white kids - teen idiocy is colour-blind) while going around a corner, because they were middle of the lane, wearing all black clothing, on a moonless night.
True, some of you like frost bite.
I'd hope so!
All I can say is "Whoo hoo!" Mow them down, cut the welfare!
// really, just kidding. And why do I have to put explicit break HTML tags in this day and age.
/// Can we train them to mow down lazy /. HTML coders instead?
/ just kidding
White face is seriously easier to notice. You'd be surprised how much it improves visibility, especially since humans are hard-wired to recognize faces quickly.
I only had a quick glance through the paper so not sure if it's addressed, but: what is the normal everyday rate of human drivers hitting people with darker skin? How does that compare to self-driving cars?
I nearly hit a dark-skinned cyclist just a couple days ago, about 3 seconds after he was nearly hit by another car. Wearing almost all black and riding at night with no lights. He was nearly completely invisible and it was obvious the other car only saw him at the last second, just like I did - in fact one of the only reasons I saw him at all was I saw the other car stop weirdly suddenly and then reverse.
If your self-driving car relies on the same stuff as humans then it seems obvious they're going to have similar problems, right? I learned as a kid not to wear dark colours at night if I was going to be near roads.
It'd be nice if self-driving cars were better than humans in every single case but it's not necessary - as long as they're not worse, but generally better, they'll be worth it, I reckon.
Image recognition tends to be more sensitive to texture than to shape
Not the kind used in autonomous driving which it lots, lot more concerned about the shape of people than textures, since they could be wearing anything.
darker skin results in less contrast, which means less ability to see things like facial features
Facial features are like 1/1000000 as important as just knowing "that is a human" which is looking at a whole body shape. Mostly a car camera would not have enough resolution to perceive facial features very well.
You have to be able to determine a fully masked human just as well as anything, and measure intent purely by large scale gestures and movement.
Similarly, object detection should not be used for verifying that nothing is beside you, behind you, or in front of you. Those additional sanity checks are what RADAR, LIDAR, and SONAR are for.
All sensors should be collecting data on all objects at all times anywhere around you and doing a thing called "sensor fusion" to determine what is actually around them. You CANNOT partition object recognition to just one system. Even simply ultrasonic sensors can verify if something is really as close as cameras say it is.
detecting people near the road is often useful
And that is back to what I am saying, you want to detect people way more than faces, skin color DOES NOT MATTER ONE BIT for that task, especially as the cameras are probably very IR sensitive.
And detecting gestures of police officers or other personnel directing traffic also needs to work regardless of their skin color.
Exactly, so SKIN COLOR DOES NOT MATTER.
So it is important to ensure that training data doesn't show racial bias.
It cannot have a "racial bias" and work at all, because the world is not a nudist colony.
Basically, it's like saying that a new nuclear reactor could seriously screw up the world if you forget to connect it to a water supply. My response is, "Yeah, no kidding."
This part I agree on, because basically nothing can work if the training data is as poor as they suppose, such a system would not even be on the road with a test driver. Any self driving car system to even think about being put on the road is way beyond skin color as an issue, by definition of what it has to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or if they're also wearing dark clothes... The face is not typically covered so light skinned people still have light faces at night even if the rest of their body is covered with dark clothing.
How do these systems perform when identifying people wearing dark coverings such as motorcycle helmets, veils or balaclavas etc?
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Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often, Study Recommends.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... is very high
Casteism
A dark skinned person wearing dark clothing at night is also harder for a human to notice.
A self driving car does not need to specifically recognize people, only object of any type to avoid crashing into them.
You're also a fucking idiot. Skin colour has no fucking correlation to using a defined crossing.
Culture does; Chinese people seem incapable of avoiding them. British people treat them as convenient but entirely optional.
I just wish the self-driving advocates would decide whether we want it to be better than a human or not. So many "but a human does it too" comments are way off base. In self driving you have the opportunity to be better than a human, why would you not take every opportunity to eliminate every flaw?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'll bet they will hit people who wear all black/navy blue with their hoods up more often too!
Heck, I'll bet humans hit them more too. You know, Scene Contrast. I can't tell you how much I hate the NY "we wear all dark clothes" thing on rainy nights. Add in jaywalking, and I can't tell you how close I've come at times. It is why I added "Black retro-reflective" stripes to one of my black jackets, and one of my new jackets is safety yellow with DOT level 3 striping. Sometimes I'm required to be roadside at night in bad weather, and I want to be seen.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Thinking that accidently being more likely to hit people who are harder to detect on cameras is a carry-over of real world prejudice tends to show how people have lost perspective on what that really is.
Not everything that disproportionately impacts some racial marker is racist, only a deliberate effort to target by race does that.
Automated processes and algorithms aren't racist.
n/t
"Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images."
Another possible solution would've been to randomly hit people with light skin color that the AI recognized with a small probability, so that it evens out.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Man, I wish that show hadn't been cancelled. The episode with the drinking fountains was just too predictive.
https://vimeo.com/29017688