Google Research Leads To Automated Real-Time Pedestrian Detection 57
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a story about one of the unexciting but vital bits of technology that will need to be even further developed as autonomous cars' presence grows: making sure that those cars don't hit people. Google researchers have recently presented findings about a method that tops previous ones for real-time pedestrian detection using neural nets "that is both extremely fast and extremely accurate." From the article: There are other approaches that provide a real-time solution on the GPU but in doing so, have not achieved accuracy targets (in this real-time approach there was a miss rate of 42% on the Caltech pedestrian detection benchmark). Another approach called the VeryFast method can run at 100 frames per second (compared to the Google team's 15) but the miss rate is even greater. Others that emphasize accuracy, even with GPU acceleration, are up to 195 times slower.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. As usual, the summary is confusing as it gives numbers for the *older* methods, but the current Google's method is: "The resulting approach achieves a 26.2% average miss rate on the Caltech Pedestrian detection benchmark, which is competitive with the very best reported results. "
So, there's 26.2% chance that on a single particular image, you miss the pedestrian (at the same time, it seems that in about 15-20% images it sees a pedestrian that is in fact a shrubbery or whatever). This is an academic dataset, and in reality you will have a video feed. AFAICS it's not clear how the precision translates when you have a sequence of many pictures of the pedestrian - whether you will have much higher chances to spot them at least on some of them, or if it's more of a systematic problem and khaki-clothed people just don't stand a chance.
My concerns (Score:1)
Look, Google cars have had a few hits, they released ONE data set showing a hit from behind, what I noticed on that metric was THERE WERE NO PEDESTRIANS being tracked. It's like it wasn't seeing pedestrians.
I also notice that other report it sits in the middle of the road far more than normal, which suggests to me the fix was to avoid the sides as much as possible and only spot pedestrians if they step out into the road.
So really what I want is a little less icky-sticky-butty-licky from the regulators and a
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No matter how bad human drivers are, there will have to be standardized tests conducted by third parties before these things can be operated fully autonomously, or sold to consumers. The failure conditions will have to be understood. These cars are pretty fresh of
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A is right. The task is identifying pedestrians. Miss rate means that the algorithm fails to identify the pedestrian. Lower number is better.
Also, when the algorithm fails, it doesn't mean the car will just happily drive through the pedestrian!
First, most pedestrians are not at the road, and the ones at the road should be actually easier to identify as they won't blend that much (I guess). Second, there are probably already many components that already identify obstacles and try to avoid them. Identifyi
LiDAR is the primary sensing modality not video (Score:1)
I don't think some people posting here understand that video-based detection, the subject of this paper, is not the current object detection modality for Google's autonomous vehicles. Those primarily use LiDAR to detect people, cyclist, vehicles, and other objects. It is much easier and much more reliable to detect objects with LiDAR compared to video-based detection as you get a nice cluster of 3D points without having to worry about whether the sun is out or even in light fog or dusty conditions.
I believe
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More like:
1) "That was a pedestrian you just hit"
or
2) "That might have been a pedestrian you just hit"
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Re:Two ideas (Score:5, Funny)
it seems that the new much-more-accurate algorithm still misses 30% of cases. For me, hurting (even killing) 3 out of 10 pedestrians still sounds quite bad.
missing 30% isn't killing 3 out of 10 people, it's killing 7 out of 10 people which is a solid 70 points or 210 points if you are drifting. #Carmageddon
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Well, the question here is. Given that 26.2% at 15 fps, does that make the probability of a detection within a second (1-.262)^15 = .010491689? So less than one percent?
Or is it far larger because the results are not actually independent?
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For me, hurting (even killing) 3 out of 10 pedestrians still sounds quite bad.
Unless we know what the video feed is we can't make that statement. Are these pedestrians crossing the road or on the sidewalk? If the algorithm is missing 3 out of 10 sidewalk pedestrains that's much less serious than 3 out of 10 crossing the road. I suspect the idea behind the visual search is to identify people who could potentially cross the road so the car can slow down in anticipation. People actually on the road, in front of the car, can be spotted in other ways using other sensors.
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But why are they implying that something is almost done, when quite a few basic problems haven't still been tackled?
This isn't about not hitting pedestrians in the roadway. This is about categorizing objects outside the roadway so that you know if they are pedestrians, who may enter the roadway at any time, or stationary objects, which may be presumed to stay stationary. Once categorized as a pedestrian, additional algorithms can be used to guess whether the pedestrians are going to enter the roadway and take defensive driving precautions to avoid hitting them.
Note that even if this algorithm were wrong 100% of the tim
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And, apparently, human drivers need extra sets of eyes. Now we need to make eye contact with pedestrians AND bicycles AND lane-splitting motorcycles coming up from behind us.
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It doesn't have to be perfect. (Score:3)
It just has to be equal to a human driver - and human drivers are not that good.
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This notion that human drivers aren't that good needs to die. How many rides occur each day? How many pedestrians are hit? Yeah, a lot and very few. Computers have a very high bar to reach just to be on par with humans.
-Chris
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You just have to have one death (Score:2)
It has to be much better than a human driver or the lawyers will be all over it. Human drivers get sued too (and/or hauled off to jail).
Google has deep pockets. You just have to have one death, and the lawyers will be all over it. The can smell a deep pocket from several states away.
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It just has to be equal to a human driver - and human drivers are not that good.
In a completely rational world, perhaps. We don't live in a rational world. We live in a world where unusual accidents are governed by media hysteria and lawyers.
And what happens with liability for such an accident with an autonomous car? Who is responsible? The driver? The manufacturer? The individual programmers who created the recognition and behavioral subroutines?
Here's the reality -- early adopters of autonomous cars are probably going to be wealthy folks, because like any new technology the
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There's another confounding factor to this ... every autonomous car collision will be documented in exquisite detail, but in a format that few are familiar with.
So ... if the logs say that the car was at fault, people will use that to crucify those responsible for the car. And if the logs say that the pedestrian was at fault ... people will say that the logs were altered, incomplete, etc. and use those claims (accurate or not) to crucify those responsible for the car. And if something went wrong and there
"Active City Stop" (Score:2)
One of the recent models of Mazda I drove (I'm pretty sure all manufacturers have that, Ford at the very least) had "active city stop" feature, active at speeds up to, 30km/h, if I remember correctly.
Car would emergency break ON ITS OWN if it would spot a pedestrian.
To my knowledge, they use some "radar like" technology for it.
I guess it's not far sighted enough for a self driving car.
Simple method. (Score:2)
But wait: pedestrians are blurred in Street View!! (Score:2)
Q: Why does Google blur out pedestrians' faces in Street View?
A: So self-driving cars won't develop an attachment to them.
Q: Why does Google blur out license plates?
A: To protect the identity of self-driving cars that mow 'em down for sport and points.
Q: Why then is Google developing a 'real-time pedestrian detection' system?
A: To improve scoring and help populate their Deathrace 2015 leaderboard.
Bonus round!! WHY?? is this FUNNY?? (Score:2)
Q: Why does Google blur out pedestrians' faces in Street View?
A: So self-driving cars won't develop an attachment to them.
It is indisputable that Google blurs faces in Street View, and the same company is also developing self-driving cars. Though different teams are assigned these projects and Street View images are not used by self-driving cars, the fact that Google is responsible for both is mentally noted, providing enough connection to lay a comedic foundation. Such a foundation is tenuous however and successful delivery of a joke requires follow-through that is quick and emotionally jarring.
The follow-though is accompli
Still wondering (Score:1)
Who is legally responsible if an automatic car does hit someone?
Just make sure you buy the Volvo option!!! (Score:2)
The car being tested didn't have the "pedestrian detection" option so the car hesitated, then plowed into the journalists recording the self-parking event!
http://fusion.net/story/139703/self-parking-car-accident-no-pedestrian-detection/
Highwaymen of the future (Score:1)
Pshaw -- easy. (Score:2)
Simply add face recognition to the muffler, problem solved. " Yep , that was a pedestrian -- and we even know who."
But since it's Google, they'll probably do something higher-tech like measuring the reaction of the shock absorbers. And unlike their WiFi scanning, they've got two chances to get it right!
What? Why are you looking at me funny?
1: "My dog here has fleas and I'd like to kill them."
2: Opens the door and tosses the dog into the roaring fu
Not that bad (Score:2)
I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. It doesn't say it can't detect objects, just that it can't always determine if that object is a human. So it's not going to just run people over. If you had to decide between hitting a cone or a person, most people would prefer to hit the cone. Autonomous cars strive to make the same decisions. Another thought, we already know Google's autonomous cars try to predict what an object might do next. A cone will likely act differently than a human, which may affect how the
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which may affect how the car chooses to act when it gets close to the object/person. (Slowing down when it gets close to the human, even if it's not in the car's direct path)
This is why the robot car will suck. It will have to be slow to be over-cautious, and this will make it unappealing, if not the laughing stock of other car owners. If you've ever been a passenger of on old person you will know this is not an experience anyone will pay money for.