10 ms·

"I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took

"I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent." How is this relevant to self driving cars in 2016 and the following decades?

seibelj 10y ago
I think he/she is arguing that what people are "ooing" and "ahhing" about is not really that amazing or novel, it's the infinite number of edge cases that will kill people regularly that is difficult and will not be solved for quite some time.
- mtgx 10y ago
  That's why I disagree with Elon Musk and others who say "autonomous driving systems only need to be like 50% or 2x better than the average driver". What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Doesn't that mean that these cars would now put me in more danger than I would normally be in with my own manual car? Self-driving cars should be 10x better than the best (as in safest by number of incidents, say, per decade) drivers on Earth. Then I could begin trusting them ... if only there wasn't that pesky security issue, too, with self-driving cars getting hacked and then driving you off the highway at 70mph and killing you. We see Teslas getting remotely hacked. If that happens with Tesla, a Silicon Valley car company with a lot of hired top tech talent, how can we ever trust a company like GM or Volkswagen to build safe self-driving cars?
  - jp555 10y ago
    But even if you're the best driver around you 19/20 times you still drive now. I don't see why you give wetware more leeway than hardware.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Doesn't that mean that these cars would now put me in more danger than I would normally be in with my own manual car? Because you are unlikely always that. Are you tired? Do you have a cold? Are you hungry? Are you playing with the radio? Are you having a conversation with a passenger? The huge advantage that self-driving cars will have is integrated systemic control from multiple sensor sources and multiple transducer outputs--and they will never get distracted. Human drivers have mostly 1 input: vision. Human drivers have mostly two outputs: hand and foot. The lag in that system from input to output is >100ms even if you are perfect (I will grant you an exception if your name is Michael Schumacher). Automated systems will have far more inputs. Multiple vision sources. Multiple radars. Temperature readings. RPM readings. etc. Automated systems have far more outputs. Steering is the same. Brakes on individual tires is the big starter. With electric, individual suspension becomes feasible. Transmissions change form and become electrically controlled. And the lag in the system is probably <10ms. That's huge. That's the difference in reacting in roughly 3 meters (2.7 meters) vs 1/3 of a meter at 100kph (9 feet vs 1 foot roughly for 60mph). Finally, automated systems will take subtle preventative actions all the time. They will "see" the child on bicycle on the sidewalk (the idiot detector as Google called it) and "know" that they need to find him again when they attempt to turn right or slow down significantly. They will see the dude on a skateboard and know that they need to give him an extra couple feet if they can in order to deal with him falling. I know very few drivers that are that diligent.
    - walshemj 10y ago
      yeh but humans have full AGI unless the culture comes calling (giz us a job dizzy) it isn't going to happen soon
      - hx87 10y ago
        AGIs aren't necessary to drive safely; a sufficiently advanced ANI will do.
        walshemj 10y ago
        In all conditions? not all driving is on a clear day on a motorway.
        hx87 10y ago
        An AI that would be able to drive in all conditions (but not be able to do anything other than drive the car) would still be an ANI.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    If you are 5x better than the average driver, the most likely cause of any accident you are in will be the other driver. Why wouldn't you want to make them better?
  - tim333 10y ago
    Well ideally everything should be perfect but if a 2x system cuts US fatalities from 30k/yr to 15k are you going to ban it?
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Then don't use the system? You are giving thresholds - 50% to 2x better, 10x better. Before what? Before we ban manual driving? "10x better than the best driver" might make sense. Before we allow it on the road? Why not "better than the worst drivers we allow on the road"? The most relevant point for Musk is probably "before the marketing works out". The market of people who consider themselves "substantially below average" drivers is much smaller than the market of people who consider themselves "not all that much better than average".
  - hx87 10y ago
    > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? How do you know that you're actually 5x better than the average driver and not just deluding yourself?
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Yes, that reminds me of the stretch on the 101 near Palo Alto that has two sets of lane markings (one old and slightly faded out but still very visible, and one newly repainted). Of course, drivers should only follow the newly painted set of lane markings. Even as a human, I get confused while driving on this stretch. The old lane markings aren't quite faded out enough to easily tell them apart. As I'm driving, I see every other car slowing down and "dead reckoning," too. How will the run-of-the-mill self-driving car's lane following handle this corner case? If it's a Canny edge detector (like most self-driving cars), it's definitely going to fail and find false positives.
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    Why do you assume most self-driving cars use Canny edge detection? And even if they did, you can simply have the algorithm choose the higher threshold (with some other sanity checks, suck as are the lines the expected distance apart) and ignore the lower threshold. The algorithms for lane following are quite a bit more sophisticated than that though. Here's a paper from 2008, and there are other approaches as well. http://www.vision.caltech.edu/malaa/publications/aly08realtime.pdf http://www.vision.caltech.edu/malaa/publications/aly08realti...
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      Hough lines/RANSAC are definitely on the same level of ad-hoc sophistication as Canny edges (in fact, Canny edges are often done as a preprocessing step for the voting scheme used by the candidate Hough lines). Take a look at Figure 12 for an exemplary look at its failure cases -- cases that are much less forgiving than the aforementioned Palo Alto stretch 101 lane markings.
      - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
        I'd have thought road-marking interpretation would nowadays be based on something more elaborate, such as HOG, without the need for an initial edge-detection pass. (But in this case, I'll add that HOG doesn't solve the problem of overlapping old/new road markings)
phkahler 10y ago
>> How is this relevant to self driving cars in 2016 and the following decades? My point is that basic lane following can be done quite trivially, but it's nowhere near something one should entrust with the safety of human beings. Your question implies that you think all modern systems being deployed involve some really sophisticated AI. You don't know that.
- phkahler 10y ago
  As an example, anything using LIDAR is probably fundamentally incapable of robust object identification and tracking.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Is that statement backwards?
    - phkahler 10y ago
      >> Is that statement backwards? Nope. LIDAR is used to determine geometry when a camera system can't tell WTF it's looking at.
      - robotresearcher 10y ago
        But you stated that anything using LIDAR was not capable of robust tracking. Perhaps you meant that anything using LIDAR was doing so because camera-based tracking is not very robust. But that's not the straightforward interpretation of your statement.
        phkahler 10y ago
        >> But that's not the straightforward interpretation of your statement. Yes, that would be a communication problem of mine. It's something I'm working on ;-) But I would counter that LIDAR isn't going to fully make up for the problems of the camera based system with the result being a simple sounding statement like "if they're using LIDAR it's not good enough", or grossly oversimplified to "LIDAR sucks". I will admit that LIDAR could conceivably enhance a really good vision system by offering better depth perception, but I don't believe that's why people are using it today.

seibelj 10y ago

I think he/she is arguing that what people are "ooing" and "ahhing" about is not really that amazing or novel, it's the infinite number of edge cases that will kill people regularly that is difficult and will not be solved for quite some time.

mtgx 10y ago
That's why I disagree with Elon Musk and others who say "autonomous driving systems only need to be like 50% or 2x better than the average driver". What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Doesn't that mean that these cars would now put me in more danger than I would normally be in with my own manual car? Self-driving cars should be 10x better than the best (as in safest by number of incidents, say, per decade) drivers on Earth. Then I could begin trusting them ... if only there wasn't that pesky security issue, too, with self-driving cars getting hacked and then driving you off the highway at 70mph and killing you. We see Teslas getting remotely hacked. If that happens with Tesla, a Silicon Valley car company with a lot of hired top tech talent, how can we ever trust a company like GM or Volkswagen to build safe self-driving cars?
- jp555 10y ago
  But even if you're the best driver around you 19/20 times you still drive now. I don't see why you give wetware more leeway than hardware.
- bsder 10y ago
  > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Doesn't that mean that these cars would now put me in more danger than I would normally be in with my own manual car? Because you are unlikely always that. Are you tired? Do you have a cold? Are you hungry? Are you playing with the radio? Are you having a conversation with a passenger? The huge advantage that self-driving cars will have is integrated systemic control from multiple sensor sources and multiple transducer outputs--and they will never get distracted. Human drivers have mostly 1 input: vision. Human drivers have mostly two outputs: hand and foot. The lag in that system from input to output is >100ms even if you are perfect (I will grant you an exception if your name is Michael Schumacher). Automated systems will have far more inputs. Multiple vision sources. Multiple radars. Temperature readings. RPM readings. etc. Automated systems have far more outputs. Steering is the same. Brakes on individual tires is the big starter. With electric, individual suspension becomes feasible. Transmissions change form and become electrically controlled. And the lag in the system is probably <10ms. That's huge. That's the difference in reacting in roughly 3 meters (2.7 meters) vs 1/3 of a meter at 100kph (9 feet vs 1 foot roughly for 60mph). Finally, automated systems will take subtle preventative actions all the time. They will "see" the child on bicycle on the sidewalk (the idiot detector as Google called it) and "know" that they need to find him again when they attempt to turn right or slow down significantly. They will see the dude on a skateboard and know that they need to give him an extra couple feet if they can in order to deal with him falling. I know very few drivers that are that diligent.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    yeh but humans have full AGI unless the culture comes calling (giz us a job dizzy) it isn't going to happen soon
    - hx87 10y ago
      AGIs aren't necessary to drive safely; a sufficiently advanced ANI will do.
      - walshemj 10y ago
        In all conditions? not all driving is on a clear day on a motorway.
        hx87 10y ago
        An AI that would be able to drive in all conditions (but not be able to do anything other than drive the car) would still be an ANI.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  If you are 5x better than the average driver, the most likely cause of any accident you are in will be the other driver. Why wouldn't you want to make them better?
- tim333 10y ago
  Well ideally everything should be perfect but if a 2x system cuts US fatalities from 30k/yr to 15k are you going to ban it?
- dllthomas 10y ago
  > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? Then don't use the system? You are giving thresholds - 50% to 2x better, 10x better. Before what? Before we ban manual driving? "10x better than the best driver" might make sense. Before we allow it on the road? Why not "better than the worst drivers we allow on the road"? The most relevant point for Musk is probably "before the marketing works out". The market of people who consider themselves "substantially below average" drivers is much smaller than the market of people who consider themselves "not all that much better than average".
- hx87 10y ago
  > What if I drive 5x better and safer than the "average driver"? How do you know that you're actually 5x better than the average driver and not just deluding yourself?
Hydraulix989 10y ago
Yes, that reminds me of the stretch on the 101 near Palo Alto that has two sets of lane markings (one old and slightly faded out but still very visible, and one newly repainted). Of course, drivers should only follow the newly painted set of lane markings. Even as a human, I get confused while driving on this stretch. The old lane markings aren't quite faded out enough to easily tell them apart. As I'm driving, I see every other car slowing down and "dead reckoning," too. How will the run-of-the-mill self-driving car's lane following handle this corner case? If it's a Canny edge detector (like most self-driving cars), it's definitely going to fail and find false positives.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  Why do you assume most self-driving cars use Canny edge detection? And even if they did, you can simply have the algorithm choose the higher threshold (with some other sanity checks, suck as are the lines the expected distance apart) and ignore the lower threshold. The algorithms for lane following are quite a bit more sophisticated than that though. Here's a paper from 2008, and there are other approaches as well. http://www.vision.caltech.edu/malaa/publications/aly08realtime.pdf http://www.vision.caltech.edu/malaa/publications/aly08realti...
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Hough lines/RANSAC are definitely on the same level of ad-hoc sophistication as Canny edges (in fact, Canny edges are often done as a preprocessing step for the voting scheme used by the candidate Hough lines). Take a look at Figure 12 for an exemplary look at its failure cases -- cases that are much less forgiving than the aforementioned Palo Alto stretch 101 lane markings.
    - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
      I'd have thought road-marking interpretation would nowadays be based on something more elaborate, such as HOG, without the need for an initial edge-detection pass. (But in this case, I'll add that HOG doesn't solve the problem of overlapping old/new road markings)

phkahler 10y ago

>> How is this relevant to self driving cars in 2016 and the following decades? My point is that basic lane following can be done quite trivially, but it's nowhere near something one should entrust with the safety of human beings. Your question implies that you think all modern systems being deployed involve some really sophisticated AI. You don't know that.

phkahler 10y ago
As an example, anything using LIDAR is probably fundamentally incapable of robust object identification and tracking.
- Animats 10y ago
  Is that statement backwards?
  - phkahler 10y ago
    >> Is that statement backwards? Nope. LIDAR is used to determine geometry when a camera system can't tell WTF it's looking at.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      But you stated that anything using LIDAR was not capable of robust tracking. Perhaps you meant that anything using LIDAR was doing so because camera-based tracking is not very robust. But that's not the straightforward interpretation of your statement.
      - phkahler 10y ago
        >> But that's not the straightforward interpretation of your statement. Yes, that would be a communication problem of mine. It's something I'm working on ;-) But I would counter that LIDAR isn't going to fully make up for the problems of the camera based system with the result being a simple sounding statement like "if they're using LIDAR it's not good enough", or grossly oversimplified to "LIDAR sucks". I will admit that LIDAR could conceivably enhance a really good vision system by offering better depth perception, but I don't believe that's why people are using it today.