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Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists (www.kcl.ac.uk)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists::Researchers call for tighter regulations following major age and race-based discrepancies in AI autonomous systems.

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[–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

Seriously no pun intended: infrared cameras see black-body radiation, which depends on the temperature of the object being imaged, not its surface chemistry. As long as a person has a live human body temperature, they're glowing with plenty of long-wave IR to see them, regardless of their skin melanin content.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I thought we were talking about near-IR cameras using active illumination (so, an IR spotlight).

    I didn't think low-wave IR cameras are fast enough and have enough resolution to be used on a car. Every one I have seen so far gives you a low-res low-FPS image, because there just isn't enough long-wave IR falling into the lens.

    You know, on any camera you have to balance exposure time and noise/resolution with the amount of light getting into the lens. If the amount of light decreases, you have to either take longer exposures (->lower FPS), decrease the resolution (so that more light falls onto one pixel), or increase the ISO, thereby increasing noise. Or increase the lens diameter, but that's not always an option.

    And since long-wave IR has super little "light", I didn't think the result would work for cars, which do need a decent amount of resolution, high FPS and low noise so that their image recognition algos aren't confused.

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