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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
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!
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
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).
....because physics is racis.
-Styopa
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?
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.
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
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.
This is the most slashdot ever answer. World throws up results you don't like? Just beat people until they start denying reality. Problem solved!
SJW n. One who posts facts.