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I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smar

I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smart enough to increase ISO to get more detail at night time.

steve19 9y ago
I don't think Uber are stupid enough to doctor evidence before handing it to police.
- fudged71 9y ago
  Uber has built tools to track and avoid police. This is NOT below them.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    Under the new CEO?
    - dustinmoorenet 9y ago
      Third comment I have seen by you mentioning the new CEO, so I think this is worth stating. Does a new CEO automatically change all the thinking from all the employees that were hired under the old CEO? Uber has a compromised integrity because they, as a collection of managers, made immoral/illegal decisions. So yeah, hiding information to save their ass is something I see as possible.
      - rgbrenner 9y ago
        Not just their thinking.. after 9 years, they have policies, practices, rituals, incentives, etc (both written and unwritten) that supported those immoral/illegal decisions. And the employees aren't helpless either. If they don't like this new CEO, they can choose to withhold information, don't write things down that are no longer approved of, etc while their direct manager looks the other way. They can collectively undermine the CEO until he's completely ineffective and forced to leave. The culture is one of the hardest things to change inside of a company once it's established. It's self-reinforcing. So we have to wait a couple of years to see if he's successful. There's no guarantee he'll win just because he's at the top.
      - mehrdadn 9y ago
        I don't know about you, but if I was in his shoes coming in trying to fix a company with a compromised integrity like this, I would be making it very clear to the employees on day 1 that anyone who continued the same old crap or showed similarly questionable judgment (whether to the company's benefit or otherwise) would be fired instantly, end of story. I'd bet that would change things mighty quick. And I don't think this is the only solution either. So yeah, I think it's very doable if the CEO is serious about it, and he very much seems to be. I'm more than open to see evidence to the contrary, but until then, I think it's quite wrong and unfair to assume they would be continuing their previous practices.
        macintux 9y ago
        You're arguing they deserve the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Most people seem to feel they've done enough damage that it's on Uber to prove they're worthy of trust.
        rgbrenner 9y ago
        Culture is much harder to change than you're making it out to be. The employees are not his subjects that can be bossed around and ordered to behave in a certain manner. That's old school management thinking (from 50+ years ago) that's very ineffective. The culture is one of the hardest things to change once it has been established. It prevents companies from entering certain market segments; from competing in certain ways; from taking certain actions. In a large company, it's so difficult to change, that it's easier and more effective to establish groups outside of the company to pursue new initiatives. For example, this is the reason why AWS is separated from the retail segment inside amazon. Why Walmart won't compete with Nordstrom. And why large companies regularly create subsidiaries to innovate on new ideas or pursue new market segments (and they're often established off-site, so the corporations culture doesn't carry over). GM makes a great example about how difficult that can be. They spent billions on Saturn as an experiment to build a new car company. Later they tried to integrate Saturns success into GM by adopting their culture and other practices... but it didn't matter what the management wanted... Saturn died and GM didn't change. Saturn's culture didn't infect GM--GM successfully killed a culture that tried to change them, even after seeing the success of Saturn.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  Maybe not. Perfectly within their wheelhouse to provide the one video or version of video that makes them look best.
macawfish 9y ago
I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. This incident has my wondering: of all the companies working on this, why is Uber trusted to be testing this technology?
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. I would be surprised under the new CEO.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Culture takes time to change and we don’t know how hard they’re trying. A new CEO matters long-term but lower level management matters more in the short-term.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It wasn't just the CEO who was the problem at Uber.
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      That's not what I was suggesting either. We had a long discussion in a nearby thread about this; I got tired of it but check it out if you're interested.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Yeah, I found it only after I replied. I read through all of it now; I don't think I have any points to add to it.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ubers-self-driving-1793368132 https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube... > Levandowski seemed to struggle in other ways as well. In December, Uber dispatched 16 self-driving cars, with safety drivers, in San Francisco without seeking a permit from the California DMV. The test went poorly—on the first day, a self-driving car ran a red light, and the DMV ordered Uber to halt its program in the state. > The company suffered further embarrassment when a New York Times article, citing leaked documents, suggested that Uber’s explanation for the traffic violation—that it had been caused by human error—wasn’t complete. The car malfunctioned, and the driver failed to stop it. > The misdirection came as no surprise to the Uber employees who’d spent time at Otto’s San Francisco headquarters. Someone there had distributed stickers—in OSHA orange—with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Safety third.”
ttul 9y ago
That would be criminal. Nobody at Uber would risk that.
- nugi 9y ago
  I wish I could agree. Uber is well known for being unafraid of criminal actions to protect their "Bottom line".
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    I'm not aware of those kinds of practices under the new CEO. Are you?
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      It's great that Uber changed the CEO and he's trying to change the culture. But that doesn't happen overnight. This is a 9 year old company with 12000 employees. It has a culture that has been built and reinforced over that time. As CEO, he doesnt make decisions at the front line directly, and it may take him a few years to convince everyone in the company to adopt his rules (and he may even fail, depending on the incentives inside the company). There's no magic wand a CEO can use to change a company overnight.
- blagie 9y ago
  I've seen criminal behavior at a much more reputable organization. Top-10 university, senior leadership. Much more criminal. This shit happens and it's more common than you'd think.
  - theptip 9y ago
    Sad but true.
- hcknwscommenter 9y ago
  Are you joking? Uber has always flaunted laws. Even in their home town it was illegal to offer a taxi service without a license. They did it anyway. Later, the city decided to differentiate between ride hailing via app and sticking your arm out to hail a cab. That change happened after uber broke the law.
StavrosK 9y ago
The cars don't have to increase ISO to get detail, that's for human eyes. Increasing ISO only works because we can't see details in shadows, but computers don't have that limitation. A neural network wouldn't have to add 100 to each pixel to make out detail, like a human would.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > The cars don't have to increase ISO to get detail, that's for human eyes. Increasing ISO only works because we can't see details in shadows, but computers don't have that limitation. A neural network wouldn't have to add 100 to each pixel to make out detail, like a human would. I'm not an expert on this stuff but I think you're misunderstanding or mixing up the ISO value with exposure compensation. The ISO value corresponds to the sensor's sensitivity, and even RAW photos (which are more or less dumps of the raw sensor data) are captured with specific ISO values, and look different at different ISOs.
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    Yes, the ISO is the amplifier gain, essentially.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  Sorry, in short you're wrong, yes they do. I'm on my phone so I will be brief. The ISO determines the sensitivity of the sensor in the camera to the photons hitting each bucket in the "sensor array". This sensitivity combined with frequency of the photon hits determines the data that makes up the actual image. If you could theoretically dump the RAW data from an image recorded for a different ISO for the same image, it would be different for each one. You can't "boost" an image's ISO post-capture, because the sensor data is already captured. What you can do is increase the values of those pixels that are appreciably close to buy not equal to zero, but for which data exists, giving the impression of pulling out data from the shadows, but the limitations/complexities are too much to go into here. When you do so in practice, you do not have as much relative detail in those extremes. What we interpret as "noise", typically in high ISO low light photography, is a real thing that the computer cannot perfectly compensate for, because it's a fundamental property of both the hardware, but more importantly, of background light/radiation and the probability/quantum nature of light...
cozzyd 9y ago
I suspect the raw output of their main sensing sensors is proprietary somehow.
- Balgair 9y ago
  Doubtful. There's no way they are making the CCDs/MOSFETS/etc. themselves, you'd need a heck of a chip fab and for almost no increase in usability. Most chips these days are very good at what they do. The main issue is what kind of sensor are they using. However, based on the compression that twitter is using to send you the video, we really don't have any way of knowing what the sensor is (bit-depth, frame-rate, dwell time, wavelength sensitivity, etc). exp: http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_detector/ccdgroup/optheory/ccdoperation.html http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_detector/ccdgroup/optheory/ccd...
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    I don't mean they made their own CCD chips, (and I guess I didn't mean raw like what the voltages are at the digitizer), but the configuration and pre-processing prior to being fed into their algorithm probably is considered valuable enough that they wouldn't want to publicly display it.
    - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
      Do you mean trade secret? There shouldn't be any copyright/IP claim on the autonimously created sensor data.
      - Balgair 9y ago
        If anything it would be a patent.
stuartgm 9y ago
The issue is more with the dynamic range of the sensor than the ISO. Increasing the ISO would blow out the highlights long before providing sufficient detail of the shadows (not to mention the increased noise). Regardless of this camera's performance the LIDAR and other sensors should have picked this up.
- voxadam 9y ago
  Is there any reason it wouldn't be possible to employ multiple cameras each with varying gain/ISO/aperture/exposure/shutter-speed to combat the narrow dynamic range of the individual sensors? Basically create an HDR stream in parallel instead of in series by varying the settings from frame to frame. Disclaimer: I have a frustratingly poor understanding of this subject, something I desperately need to remedy.
  - stuartgm 9y ago
    This sort of method is used in the Canon DSLR custom firmware Magic Lantern for HDR video - it brackets the exposure by ISO. However you have some problems with moving subjects: https://youtu.be/5me5jEr4ldQ?t=415 https://youtu.be/5me5jEr4ldQ?t=415 (warning - flashing images)
    - voxadam 9y ago
      That's interesting but it still seems to be utilizing a single sensor set to different exposures in series, not multiple synchronized global shutter image sensors each set to different exposures. While such a setup may have little to no use for human perception what I'm talking about is feeding each stream into a vision system, be it a classical vision pipeline or deep net system.
walrus01 9y ago
This looks to me like it came from a $30 dash cam, not the car's main visual spectrum camera sensor.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  interior view has better night vision than exterior...
  - wolfd 9y ago
    Because it can project some IR light into the car. That wouldn't work for the forward view.
sitkack 9y ago
1) It does NOT show what the LIDAR sees. 2) They should be using a dark adapted / night vision camera and probably are, the video feed presented is just that, the best one that "presents". 3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things 4) They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer. I want to know how much access to the hardware Uber had after the accident, including physical and remote. I also want to see the streaming logs and full provenance.
- TylerE 9y ago
  It's Arizona. I just checked. The high today was 92F. Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that. How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/- 5 degrees of that?
  - jakelazaroff 9y ago
    That's the temperature at the peak of day, right? The temperature in the middle of the night, when the crash occurred, should be closer to the low.
    - TylerE 9y ago
      Even lows are still in the upper 70s, and again, asphalt will absorb heat during the day and then release it at night. 10pm isn't exactly "middle of the night", either, it's only 3 hours after sunset.
  - JshWright 9y ago
    Thermal cameras care about more than just the absolute temperature of an object. The emissive and reflective properties of the material (in infrared) also matter significantly. A human being would almost certainly be visible in a thermal imaging view of that scene. When you walk outside in the daytime, everything is bathed in a uniform light from the sun, but you have no trouble distinguishing between objects, as they emit and reflect light differently.
  - 9y ago
lhorie 9y ago
> I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing This video was released by the police department. Are you suggesting someone from Uber drove down to the scene at 10pm, somehow managed to grab the SD card from the dashcam with all the police there, ran back to their car, uploaded it to their laptop, fired up Premiere, edited the brightness, downloaded the modified video back into the SD, ran back to the scene with the tampered evidence, and only then the police got to it? Sorry, but if this isn't a conspiratory theory, I don't know what is.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I'm hoping the police and NTSB have guards on the impounded car and they have a strict chain of custody on anything Uber accesses. To be fair though, Uber can probably extract, and potentially even change this data, remotely. Given their track record, that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. They'd be stupid to attempt it with the world staring at them, but this is also the company that had Greyball, the hell map, blatantly disregarded laws in many countries and had to hire Eric Holder's company to run damage control.
- jonlucc 9y ago
  Alternatively, you're assuming the police on the scene knew how to exract the video from the car without Uber's help? Edit to add: I don't really think they intentionally darken the image, but this probably isn't even the camera the car runs off of.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    I was under the impression this was just footage from an off-the-shelf dashcam. I could figure out how to get video out of mine without an instructions manual. Is that not the case here?
- formerengovert 9y ago
  A couple years ago we had the ability to remotely access and modify the recorded video on this platform. Dunno about now.
cmurf 9y ago
I think it's possible to look at the video file and find markers for modification. Certainly this is the case for JPEG, TIFF, PSD, vs Raw files. It's not impossible but very impractical to render a Raw file, edit it, and then unrender it back into a Raw file. It's also pretty malicious and I think it would show a corrupt intent to modify a Raw image in this manner. There are Raw equivalents for video, but consumer cameras are all post rendered, and heavily compressed. So modification is going to change all kinds of metadata, but in particular there will be more than the expected quantization from double compression. Again, if that were demonstrated, I think it would show a corrupt intent. The intent to deceive.
- gugagore 9y ago
  Is there any modern digital video that is "raw"? Without any lossy compression?
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Redcode Raw is an example, I'm sure there are others. This doesn't mean there's zero in-camera processing, it just means it's not rendered, ergo it's scene-referred or camera-referred. There can be lens and sensor artifacts removed, like dead pixels. OpenEXR is another such format that's camera agnostic, not totally dissimilar to Adobe DNG vs the (proprietary) Raw format used by a particular make/model of camera.
ajross 9y ago
You can't increase ISO without washing out the areas in the street lights. One of the difficulties not being discussed here is that this is a terribly lit road, with large dark voids between the street lights. And the biker was crossing in the void.
- hcknwscommenter 9y ago
  It is not a terribly lit road. You cannot increase ISO, but you CAN increase dynamic range. The human eye, as an example or as another example a much better camera, can easily see those seemingly large dark voids between street lights.
  - ajross 9y ago
    This is a common theme to all the luddits and uber haters, and I don't get it. The video doesn't show the rider until less than a second before the collision. Yet it's an article of faith among you guys that this video which does not show an easy path to avoidance actually does, due to various magic incantations: + The road lighting wasn't bad. A real eye would have shown something different that the camera can't[1], therefore the video proves what it doesn't show. + LIDAR and IR should have shown that, therefore Uber is hiding something because the video doesn't show data that must have been present. I just don't get it. I'm watching this video and seeing what is clearly a huge tragedy and a near-unavoidable collision. [1] This is not at all true in the real world, by the way. But I see little value in arguing what is clearly a point of faith and not reason.
    - gugagore 9y ago
      What do you mean by unavoidable? Do you think a human would have made the same mistake in most cases? Because then my question is, have you ever used a camera at night? It can't see as much as you (at video rates). What don't you get about people discussing other sensing technologies? Just because it wasn't clear from this video and this camera, there are other sensors which don't require illumination with visible light. Even a front facing radar might do a good job of slowing down.
mercer 9y ago
Did anyone bother to go to that exact spot at night to see what things are like from a human perspective? That strikes me as the first thing to do as a news agency...
lovelearning 9y ago
Those cars have multiple sensor feeds, many of which are far better than human vision. I have experience with off-the-shelf IR illuminators, and even an array of half a dozen of cheapo ones improve low light object detection at distances of upto 40-50m by orders of magnitude. So I feel Uber would have selected whichever feed best supported the explanation that it was "impossible" to avoid such an accident, and handed it to investigators. Given the number of people agreeing with the "impossible to avoid" explanation even in a tech-savvy crowd like HN, I'd say the PR strategy's worked well and saved Uber some more bad press.

steve19 9y ago

I don't think Uber are stupid enough to doctor evidence before handing it to police.

fudged71 9y ago
Uber has built tools to track and avoid police. This is NOT below them.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  Under the new CEO?
  - dustinmoorenet 9y ago
    Third comment I have seen by you mentioning the new CEO, so I think this is worth stating. Does a new CEO automatically change all the thinking from all the employees that were hired under the old CEO? Uber has a compromised integrity because they, as a collection of managers, made immoral/illegal decisions. So yeah, hiding information to save their ass is something I see as possible.
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      Not just their thinking.. after 9 years, they have policies, practices, rituals, incentives, etc (both written and unwritten) that supported those immoral/illegal decisions. And the employees aren't helpless either. If they don't like this new CEO, they can choose to withhold information, don't write things down that are no longer approved of, etc while their direct manager looks the other way. They can collectively undermine the CEO until he's completely ineffective and forced to leave. The culture is one of the hardest things to change inside of a company once it's established. It's self-reinforcing. So we have to wait a couple of years to see if he's successful. There's no guarantee he'll win just because he's at the top.
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      I don't know about you, but if I was in his shoes coming in trying to fix a company with a compromised integrity like this, I would be making it very clear to the employees on day 1 that anyone who continued the same old crap or showed similarly questionable judgment (whether to the company's benefit or otherwise) would be fired instantly, end of story. I'd bet that would change things mighty quick. And I don't think this is the only solution either. So yeah, I think it's very doable if the CEO is serious about it, and he very much seems to be. I'm more than open to see evidence to the contrary, but until then, I think it's quite wrong and unfair to assume they would be continuing their previous practices.
      - macintux 9y ago
        You're arguing they deserve the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Most people seem to feel they've done enough damage that it's on Uber to prove they're worthy of trust.
      - rgbrenner 9y ago
        Culture is much harder to change than you're making it out to be. The employees are not his subjects that can be bossed around and ordered to behave in a certain manner. That's old school management thinking (from 50+ years ago) that's very ineffective. The culture is one of the hardest things to change once it has been established. It prevents companies from entering certain market segments; from competing in certain ways; from taking certain actions. In a large company, it's so difficult to change, that it's easier and more effective to establish groups outside of the company to pursue new initiatives. For example, this is the reason why AWS is separated from the retail segment inside amazon. Why Walmart won't compete with Nordstrom. And why large companies regularly create subsidiaries to innovate on new ideas or pursue new market segments (and they're often established off-site, so the corporations culture doesn't carry over). GM makes a great example about how difficult that can be. They spent billions on Saturn as an experiment to build a new car company. Later they tried to integrate Saturns success into GM by adopting their culture and other practices... but it didn't matter what the management wanted... Saturn died and GM didn't change. Saturn's culture didn't infect GM--GM successfully killed a culture that tried to change them, even after seeing the success of Saturn.
Steeeve 9y ago
Maybe not. Perfectly within their wheelhouse to provide the one video or version of video that makes them look best.

macawfish 9y ago

I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. This incident has my wondering: of all the companies working on this, why is Uber trusted to be testing this technology?

mehrdadn 9y ago
> I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. I would be surprised under the new CEO.
- acdha 9y ago
  Culture takes time to change and we don’t know how hard they’re trying. A new CEO matters long-term but lower level management matters more in the short-term.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It wasn't just the CEO who was the problem at Uber.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    That's not what I was suggesting either. We had a long discussion in a nearby thread about this; I got tired of it but check it out if you're interested.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Yeah, I found it only after I replied. I read through all of it now; I don't think I have any points to add to it.
emodendroket 9y ago
https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ubers-self-driving-1793368132 https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube... > Levandowski seemed to struggle in other ways as well. In December, Uber dispatched 16 self-driving cars, with safety drivers, in San Francisco without seeking a permit from the California DMV. The test went poorly—on the first day, a self-driving car ran a red light, and the DMV ordered Uber to halt its program in the state. > The company suffered further embarrassment when a New York Times article, citing leaked documents, suggested that Uber’s explanation for the traffic violation—that it had been caused by human error—wasn’t complete. The car malfunctioned, and the driver failed to stop it. > The misdirection came as no surprise to the Uber employees who’d spent time at Otto’s San Francisco headquarters. Someone there had distributed stickers—in OSHA orange—with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Safety third.”

ttul 9y ago

That would be criminal. Nobody at Uber would risk that.

nugi 9y ago
I wish I could agree. Uber is well known for being unafraid of criminal actions to protect their "Bottom line".
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  I'm not aware of those kinds of practices under the new CEO. Are you?
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    It's great that Uber changed the CEO and he's trying to change the culture. But that doesn't happen overnight. This is a 9 year old company with 12000 employees. It has a culture that has been built and reinforced over that time. As CEO, he doesnt make decisions at the front line directly, and it may take him a few years to convince everyone in the company to adopt his rules (and he may even fail, depending on the incentives inside the company). There's no magic wand a CEO can use to change a company overnight.
blagie 9y ago
I've seen criminal behavior at a much more reputable organization. Top-10 university, senior leadership. Much more criminal. This shit happens and it's more common than you'd think.
- theptip 9y ago
  Sad but true.
hcknwscommenter 9y ago
Are you joking? Uber has always flaunted laws. Even in their home town it was illegal to offer a taxi service without a license. They did it anyway. Later, the city decided to differentiate between ride hailing via app and sticking your arm out to hail a cab. That change happened after uber broke the law.

StavrosK 9y ago

The cars don't have to increase ISO to get detail, that's for human eyes. Increasing ISO only works because we can't see details in shadows, but computers don't have that limitation. A neural network wouldn't have to add 100 to each pixel to make out detail, like a human would.

mehrdadn 9y ago
> The cars don't have to increase ISO to get detail, that's for human eyes. Increasing ISO only works because we can't see details in shadows, but computers don't have that limitation. A neural network wouldn't have to add 100 to each pixel to make out detail, like a human would. I'm not an expert on this stuff but I think you're misunderstanding or mixing up the ISO value with exposure compensation. The ISO value corresponds to the sensor's sensitivity, and even RAW photos (which are more or less dumps of the raw sensor data) are captured with specific ISO values, and look different at different ISOs.
- cozzyd 9y ago
  Yes, the ISO is the amplifier gain, essentially.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
Sorry, in short you're wrong, yes they do. I'm on my phone so I will be brief. The ISO determines the sensitivity of the sensor in the camera to the photons hitting each bucket in the "sensor array". This sensitivity combined with frequency of the photon hits determines the data that makes up the actual image. If you could theoretically dump the RAW data from an image recorded for a different ISO for the same image, it would be different for each one. You can't "boost" an image's ISO post-capture, because the sensor data is already captured. What you can do is increase the values of those pixels that are appreciably close to buy not equal to zero, but for which data exists, giving the impression of pulling out data from the shadows, but the limitations/complexities are too much to go into here. When you do so in practice, you do not have as much relative detail in those extremes. What we interpret as "noise", typically in high ISO low light photography, is a real thing that the computer cannot perfectly compensate for, because it's a fundamental property of both the hardware, but more importantly, of background light/radiation and the probability/quantum nature of light...

cozzyd 9y ago

I suspect the raw output of their main sensing sensors is proprietary somehow.

Balgair 9y ago
Doubtful. There's no way they are making the CCDs/MOSFETS/etc. themselves, you'd need a heck of a chip fab and for almost no increase in usability. Most chips these days are very good at what they do. The main issue is what kind of sensor are they using. However, based on the compression that twitter is using to send you the video, we really don't have any way of knowing what the sensor is (bit-depth, frame-rate, dwell time, wavelength sensitivity, etc). exp: http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_detector/ccdgroup/optheory/ccdoperation.html http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_detector/ccdgroup/optheory/ccd...
- cozzyd 9y ago
  I don't mean they made their own CCD chips, (and I guess I didn't mean raw like what the voltages are at the digitizer), but the configuration and pre-processing prior to being fed into their algorithm probably is considered valuable enough that they wouldn't want to publicly display it.
  - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
    Do you mean trade secret? There shouldn't be any copyright/IP claim on the autonimously created sensor data.
    - Balgair 9y ago
      If anything it would be a patent.

stuartgm 9y ago

The issue is more with the dynamic range of the sensor than the ISO. Increasing the ISO would blow out the highlights long before providing sufficient detail of the shadows (not to mention the increased noise). Regardless of this camera's performance the LIDAR and other sensors should have picked this up.

voxadam 9y ago
Is there any reason it wouldn't be possible to employ multiple cameras each with varying gain/ISO/aperture/exposure/shutter-speed to combat the narrow dynamic range of the individual sensors? Basically create an HDR stream in parallel instead of in series by varying the settings from frame to frame. Disclaimer: I have a frustratingly poor understanding of this subject, something I desperately need to remedy.
- stuartgm 9y ago
  This sort of method is used in the Canon DSLR custom firmware Magic Lantern for HDR video - it brackets the exposure by ISO. However you have some problems with moving subjects: https://youtu.be/5me5jEr4ldQ?t=415 https://youtu.be/5me5jEr4ldQ?t=415 (warning - flashing images)
  - voxadam 9y ago
    That's interesting but it still seems to be utilizing a single sensor set to different exposures in series, not multiple synchronized global shutter image sensors each set to different exposures. While such a setup may have little to no use for human perception what I'm talking about is feeding each stream into a vision system, be it a classical vision pipeline or deep net system.

walrus01 9y ago

This looks to me like it came from a $30 dash cam, not the car's main visual spectrum camera sensor.

dwighttk 9y ago
interior view has better night vision than exterior...
- wolfd 9y ago
  Because it can project some IR light into the car. That wouldn't work for the forward view.

sitkack 9y ago

1) It does NOT show what the LIDAR sees. 2) They should be using a dark adapted / night vision camera and probably are, the video feed presented is just that, the best one that "presents". 3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things 4) They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer. I want to know how much access to the hardware Uber had after the accident, including physical and remote. I also want to see the streaming logs and full provenance.

TylerE 9y ago
It's Arizona. I just checked. The high today was 92F. Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that. How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/- 5 degrees of that?
- jakelazaroff 9y ago
  That's the temperature at the peak of day, right? The temperature in the middle of the night, when the crash occurred, should be closer to the low.
  - TylerE 9y ago
    Even lows are still in the upper 70s, and again, asphalt will absorb heat during the day and then release it at night. 10pm isn't exactly "middle of the night", either, it's only 3 hours after sunset.
- JshWright 9y ago
  Thermal cameras care about more than just the absolute temperature of an object. The emissive and reflective properties of the material (in infrared) also matter significantly. A human being would almost certainly be visible in a thermal imaging view of that scene. When you walk outside in the daytime, everything is bathed in a uniform light from the sun, but you have no trouble distinguishing between objects, as they emit and reflect light differently.
- 9y ago

lhorie 9y ago

> I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing This video was released by the police department. Are you suggesting someone from Uber drove down to the scene at 10pm, somehow managed to grab the SD card from the dashcam with all the police there, ran back to their car, uploaded it to their laptop, fired up Premiere, edited the brightness, downloaded the modified video back into the SD, ran back to the scene with the tampered evidence, and only then the police got to it? Sorry, but if this isn't a conspiratory theory, I don't know what is.

djsumdog 9y ago
I'm hoping the police and NTSB have guards on the impounded car and they have a strict chain of custody on anything Uber accesses. To be fair though, Uber can probably extract, and potentially even change this data, remotely. Given their track record, that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. They'd be stupid to attempt it with the world staring at them, but this is also the company that had Greyball, the hell map, blatantly disregarded laws in many countries and had to hire Eric Holder's company to run damage control.
jonlucc 9y ago
Alternatively, you're assuming the police on the scene knew how to exract the video from the car without Uber's help? Edit to add: I don't really think they intentionally darken the image, but this probably isn't even the camera the car runs off of.
- lhorie 9y ago
  I was under the impression this was just footage from an off-the-shelf dashcam. I could figure out how to get video out of mine without an instructions manual. Is that not the case here?
formerengovert 9y ago
A couple years ago we had the ability to remotely access and modify the recorded video on this platform. Dunno about now.

cmurf 9y ago

I think it's possible to look at the video file and find markers for modification. Certainly this is the case for JPEG, TIFF, PSD, vs Raw files. It's not impossible but very impractical to render a Raw file, edit it, and then unrender it back into a Raw file. It's also pretty malicious and I think it would show a corrupt intent to modify a Raw image in this manner. There are Raw equivalents for video, but consumer cameras are all post rendered, and heavily compressed. So modification is going to change all kinds of metadata, but in particular there will be more than the expected quantization from double compression. Again, if that were demonstrated, I think it would show a corrupt intent. The intent to deceive.

gugagore 9y ago
Is there any modern digital video that is "raw"? Without any lossy compression?
- cmurf 9y ago
  Redcode Raw is an example, I'm sure there are others. This doesn't mean there's zero in-camera processing, it just means it's not rendered, ergo it's scene-referred or camera-referred. There can be lens and sensor artifacts removed, like dead pixels. OpenEXR is another such format that's camera agnostic, not totally dissimilar to Adobe DNG vs the (proprietary) Raw format used by a particular make/model of camera.

ajross 9y ago

You can't increase ISO without washing out the areas in the street lights. One of the difficulties not being discussed here is that this is a terribly lit road, with large dark voids between the street lights. And the biker was crossing in the void.

hcknwscommenter 9y ago
It is not a terribly lit road. You cannot increase ISO, but you CAN increase dynamic range. The human eye, as an example or as another example a much better camera, can easily see those seemingly large dark voids between street lights.
- ajross 9y ago
  This is a common theme to all the luddits and uber haters, and I don't get it. The video doesn't show the rider until less than a second before the collision. Yet it's an article of faith among you guys that this video which does not show an easy path to avoidance actually does, due to various magic incantations: + The road lighting wasn't bad. A real eye would have shown something different that the camera can't[1], therefore the video proves what it doesn't show. + LIDAR and IR should have shown that, therefore Uber is hiding something because the video doesn't show data that must have been present. I just don't get it. I'm watching this video and seeing what is clearly a huge tragedy and a near-unavoidable collision. [1] This is not at all true in the real world, by the way. But I see little value in arguing what is clearly a point of faith and not reason.
  - gugagore 9y ago
    What do you mean by unavoidable? Do you think a human would have made the same mistake in most cases? Because then my question is, have you ever used a camera at night? It can't see as much as you (at video rates). What don't you get about people discussing other sensing technologies? Just because it wasn't clear from this video and this camera, there are other sensors which don't require illumination with visible light. Even a front facing radar might do a good job of slowing down.

mercer 9y ago

Did anyone bother to go to that exact spot at night to see what things are like from a human perspective? That strikes me as the first thing to do as a news agency...

lovelearning 9y ago

Those cars have multiple sensor feeds, many of which are far better than human vision. I have experience with off-the-shelf IR illuminators, and even an array of half a dozen of cheapo ones improve low light object detection at distances of upto 40-50m by orders of magnitude. So I feel Uber would have selected whichever feed best supported the explanation that it was "impossible" to avoid such an accident, and handed it to investigators. Given the number of people agreeing with the "impossible to avoid" explanation even in a tech-savvy crowd like HN, I'd say the PR strategy's worked well and saved Uber some more bad press.