
Self-driving cars fail to detect dark-skinned pedestrians - pm24601
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/5/18251924/self-driving-car-racial-bias-study-autonomous-vehicle-dark-skin
======
waste_monk
I do not like the conclusion of the article.

Increasing the diversity of the team members might be good for reducing bias,
but the fact remains that darker skinned people are harder for machine vision
systems to work with due to the lack of contrast.

Like that fuss a few years ago with the laptops (I want to say it was Toshiba
but I'm not certain) not being able to use facial recognition to unlock the
OS.

Also, this seems to be only vision systems - you'd hope LIDAR would be able to
detect a pedestrian regardless of skin color.

~~~
Ace17
> the fact remains that darker skinned people are harder for machine vision
> systems to work with due to the lack of contrast.

Is it also harder for human drivers?

~~~
ASalazarMX
Depending on clothing and light conditions, yes. We don't have LIDARs, though.

------
panarky
Step 1 - find an object detection model that's not used in self-driving cars

Step 2 - show that the model detects dark-skinned pedestrians 5% less often
than light-skinned pedestrians

Step 3 - write a clickbait title implying that self-driving cars will run down
dark-skinned pedestrians with precisely zero evidence

Step 4 - post the article on HN with an even more inflammatory title than the
actual article

~~~
pm24601
FYI - I had to trim title because the original title was too long.

Take this up with HN

------
Ace17
> The report [...] hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. It didn’t test any object-
> detection models actually being used by self-driving cars, nor did it
> leverage any training datasets actually being used by autonomous vehicle
> manufacturers.

------
Jyaif
How information gets propagated in 2019:

1\. The study talks about how some vision-based object detection systems don't
work as well on black people.

2\. The articles makes the leap to self driving cars, ignoring that self
driving cars uses Lidar and probably custom made algorithms. To their credit
they do say that it's a " _potential_ risk".

3\. Everybody shares (including this HN submission) or rewrite the article
dropping the "potential" part.

------
NebeisHa
Sounds like a physical issue, about how dark surfaces reflect less light and
the car can't analyze that information. They'll find a way to fix this
eventually.

------
medecau
For those interested in learning more about these problems there are two
interesting book to read. "Technicaly Wrong" and "Weapons of Math Destruction"

------
alkibiades
how do idiots blame bias for everything? if you have a dark room of course
it’ll be harder to detect a dark skin person! the same with a couch that’s
black instead of white.

~~~
senectus1
its an issue for ocular recognition specifically. I'd say that is worth
noting!

If a automated car is _better_ at detecting threats on the road than humans
then there is little point to using them.

------
jacknews
surely this is simple physics (white surfaces reflect more light), rather than
algorithmic bias

