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The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt

The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber. The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.

jakelazaroff 8y ago
That was a bad call on the part of the police. You're only allowed to drive as fast as conditions permit. If it's dark enough that you can't avoid an obstacle by the time your headlights illuminate it, you need to slow down.
- hazardmat 8y ago
  That's not really true. Thousands of deer get killed on the road every year, because deer aren't smart enough not to be an obstacle when it's dark. Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No. It's a driving risk taken, just like any other.
  - favorited 8y ago
    The point isn't that speed limits need to change, it's that it is incumbent upon the driver to slow down if environmental conditions prevent them from traveling safely at the speed limit.
    - hazardmat 8y ago
      What is that supposed to mean? You can't have 100% safety at any speed. If it really is incumbent upon the driver to always drive at night in such a way that no collision can occur at all, then why not change the speed limit? My whole point is that it's not the driver's responsibility to account for every possible scenario. It can't be.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - favorited 8y ago
        It's not about accounting "for every possible scenario." Arizona has a Basic Speed Law, which says "A person must drive at a speed that is reasonable and prudent under the existing conditions." If the speed limit is 55 MPH, but conditions (rain, darkness, etc.) would prevent you from being able to safely stop in time to avoid a collision, then you are not allowed to drive at 55 MPH until conditions change.
      - anonymouz 8y ago
        Um, do you have a driver's license? Nobody said anything about 100% safety in some provable way. But certainly it is very much the driver's responsibility to pick a safe speed. Driver's Ed (at least in most? EU countries) teaches that the posted speed limit is just that, the maximum legally allowed speed. As a driver you -- and nobody else -- are responsible for picking a safe speed depending on the environmental conditions. In particular, the following are explicitly taught in Driver's Ed: 1) Don't overdrive your visibility (headlights, curve)... you must be able to look sufficiently far ahead such that you can stop in the event of an obstacle appearing. (In case of two-directional traffic in the same lane, you must be able to stop in half your visible distance.) 2) Reduce speed according to weather: Rain (aqua-planing), Snow/Ice (slippery), Fog (reduced visibility as in 1) 3) You must be aware of situational dangers and be ready to stop if necessary (e.g. parked cars on the side of the road between which children could emerge...) Nobody else will tell you what the maximum safe speed at any given moment is. You're supposed to learn how to handle your vehicle during driver's ed, and then act accordingly. Overdriving your visibility is just plain stupid -- you simply will not be able to avoid a collision with an object in time; you're basically driving blind and hoping for the best.
        hazardmat 8y ago
        What is that supposed to mean? What's prudent and what is safe? The reality is that driving at night isn't safe at all and that people often can't avoid collision from an obstacle suddenly appearing at night. Maybe if they drove at 15MPH at all times, it would be possible in 99% of cases, but in practice we don't expect that. Hence, we have collisions. Not because the drivers are always guilty of recklessness, but because driving at night has a risk to it. That's the point.
  - davidgould 8y ago
    Those deer are killed because thousands of humans aren't smart enough to not overdrive their headlights so they hit obstacles in the dark. Hitting a deer is not a small thing. You will seriously damage your car, and may be severely injured or killed yourself if the deer is tall enough to come through the windshield. In open range country you can also hit a cow. In some areas you can hit a moose. Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No, but we shouldn't drive like idiots either. It's not just "a driving risk taken", it's reckless and negligent behaviour.
    - docker_up 8y ago
      I've driven in Palo Alto near 280, and from the distance, in broad daylight, I saw a buck run across an entire field at full speed and straight across the road about 3-4 cars in front of me, and get hit by the car. There was no way the driver could see what I saw, and he had no chance to avoid it. The deer was simply acting irrationally. To say that people who hit deer are "driving like idiots" is wrong.
      - davidgould 8y ago
        I should probably let this go as it's off topic, but I don't understand the description of this incident: - Was this on 280, or near 280? - If the car that hit the deer was 3-4 cars ahead and you could see the deer "run across an entire field", why was "there no way the driver could see what you saw"? I'm trying to imagine what sort of obstruction could block the drivers view but not yours. - How fast was the car going? - How long did it take the deer to "run across an entire field"? - Normally deer are active around sunrise and sunset and bed down during the day (source: deer hunting). It seems odd to see a deer in running in "broad daylight".
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    > Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No, but we legally require drivers to modulate their speed to suit the conditions. > It's a driving risk taken, just like any other. So generous of drivers to take up that risk to others.
  - cli 8y ago
    In British Columbia, the speed limit is defined as the maximum speed limit when the road is bare and dry and visibility is good. From the driver's guidebook[1]: >Aim for a speed that’s appropriate for the conditions in which you are driving. The posted speed is the maximum for ideal conditions only. Choose a slower speed if the conditions are not ideal — for instance, if the roads are slippery or visibility is limited. If a driver was driving too fast to react and stop without hitting that deer, then that driver was driving too quickly. [1] http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/driving-guides/Pages/Learn-to-Drive-Smart.aspx http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/driving-guides/Pages/Le...
  - flogic 8y ago
    That's not really what tends to happen with deer. The situation starts with them on one side of the road deciding to cross. Then the partway through they freeze. There's often not time to react. Deer are very poorly adapted to dealing with roads. They're camouflaged which makes them hard to see. And while freeze is a perfectly good strategy against wolves, it absolutely sucks against a Buick.
  - crististm 8y ago
    I have a question for you: did you create this account just to troll around?
- jnwatson 8y ago
  A self-driving car doesn’t need visible light to see a pedestrian. Between Lidsr and IR, she would have lit up like a Christmas tree.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Sure, but my point is that whether or not the video was darkened (and regardless of how the car "sees") overdriving your radius of obstacle detection is an unsafe way to operate a vehicle.
wil421 8y ago
I can recall thinking the video was very bad quality. To the point where I was questioning if the video was from some dashcam they installed instead of the self driving car tech.
- tlb 8y ago
  The video was from a cheap dashcam, not any of the sensors the car uses. The LIDAR would have seen it clearly. So would your eyes, which have wider dynamic range than any but the best cameras.
  - Spare_account 8y ago
    I recall noticing that the human driver of the car was not looking forwards immediately prior to the accident, which presumably makes him/her ultimately responsible for the accident?
    - atomical 8y ago
      If the breaks don't work because of an engineering defect who is responsible? In this case it's the LIDAR that failed.
      - swebs 8y ago
        The article said the LIDAR was fine. It was the decision making software that failed.
        atomical 8y ago
        The decision making for the LIDAR?
        Piskvorrr 8y ago
        If I were to speculate: Decision making which takes LIDAR as one of the inputs.
ta9999999999999 8y ago
https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/977738312831066112 https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/977738312831066112
lhorie 8y ago
I highly doubt it, considering the video came from Tempe police, not Uber. Regardless, does it matter at this point? Uber is basically saying here that the sensors did detect the pedestrian but the issue was that the software to ignore false positives was tuned incorrectly.
- assblaster 8y ago
  Tempe police obtained the video from Uber, Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over. Uber has behaved badly in the past, and they had the motivation and past experience to do what it takes to advance their agenda. Remember, Uber terminated its autonomous driving testing as a result of this preventable tragedy.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    > Tempe police obtained the video from Uber If by "from Uber", you mean they popped the SD card from the Uber-owner car's dashcam, sure. > Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over See my comment from the last time someone had suggested the idea of doctored videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644663
    - assblaster 8y ago
      What's the timeframe on the video being handled, given to police, etc. Do the police have the authority to take any video files recorded by a vehicle involved in an auto accident? Is a warrant needed? It's more likely that the police opened an investigation, and as part of the investigation, handed over dashcam footage. We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
      - lhorie 8y ago
        IIRC the video was released by the police the next day > We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident. From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour. Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.
hamitron 8y ago
It shouldn't matter at all how dark the roads were, the vehicle was equipped with LIDAR.
- assblaster 8y ago
  It's easy for Uber to point to this video to say: "Look know dark it was! If it was you driving, you'd be in the same problem we are in!" Look how much time has passed to learn of the fact that it was Uber's sloppy programming at fault in this tragedy. The good news for Uber is that this comes out far after the event when people are in general less likely to care, or even remember the details of the accident.
  - hazardmat 8y ago
    The whole point of this piece is to put the blame on a human programmer, of course. What's there to "sloppily" program here? Most likely, somebody set an arbitrary threshold constant 0.05 too low. The data that threshold was working with will still have been provided by the machine learning system, which is opaque to humans. We'll have to face it that if we want self-driving cars, there isn't some magic procedure we can follow to not have accidents due to false classifications.
DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
The cameras used in applications like these are not like your typical 24-bit RGB cameras in phones or webcams that need gain adjustment: their sensors support a very high range of brightness values (like "high dynamic range") - but the video released to the public and the media would be MPEG/H.26x/etc which do not support HDR - or at least most video players wouldn't. The police probably lacked the expertise to know to demand the raw high-range camera data but instead just asked for "the video" and it's possible Uber deliberately took advantage of their ignorance to release a video that mitigates their culpability.
- hcknwscommenter 8y ago
  The video was not from a "high dynamic range" sensor, regardless of whether the car actually had one installed. I believe it did have such a "high dynamic range" sensor, which shows the blatant disregard for the truth that Uber is showing here by releasing such misleading video.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  The video was very obviously obtained from a dashcam solution that isn't actually used to do any of the autonomous driving. It's possible they don't even record the raw footage from the AI cameras, that's a huge bandwidth hog.
  - freyir 8y ago
    They could easily buffer the last N minutes of recorded data in a black box. Not doing so would seem pretty irresponsible.
    - InitialLastName 8y ago
      Uber? Irresponsible? Inconceivable!
throwaway057 8y ago
I drive that stretch of road almost every single day, at night. Yeah, the video looked different than what my eyes see because my eyes have better low light sensitivity than most cameras. However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. A few weeks ago, I had somebody almost walk into my car out of the shadows (this person was paying attention though, and stopped in the empty lane next to me). It turns out it's REALLY difficult to see people in the streetlight shadows.
- bkor 8y ago
  > However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. There have been many videos on that same road which were super clear. Only the Uber video was really dark. The other videos weren't. Further, darkness doesn't impact LIDAR.
  - Aspyre 8y ago
    If you want to compare conditions, were any of those videos taken without moon light? How do we know the city didn't increase the street lighting following the incident?
Piskvorrr 8y ago
I think it was just a choice of a crappy dashcam (intentional? IDK); someone coined the term "scapegoat camera" in one of the discussions. In other words, off-the-shelf dashcam equipment sucks in the dark and doesn't convey a realistic scene, no doctoring required. Here's a random piece of dashcam footage from elsewhere - watch for the pedestrians! https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM The video is unaltered - just crappy, they were actually clearly visible.

jakelazaroff 8y ago

That was a bad call on the part of the police. You're only allowed to drive as fast as conditions permit. If it's dark enough that you can't avoid an obstacle by the time your headlights illuminate it, you need to slow down.

hazardmat 8y ago
That's not really true. Thousands of deer get killed on the road every year, because deer aren't smart enough not to be an obstacle when it's dark. Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No. It's a driving risk taken, just like any other.
- favorited 8y ago
  The point isn't that speed limits need to change, it's that it is incumbent upon the driver to slow down if environmental conditions prevent them from traveling safely at the speed limit.
  - hazardmat 8y ago
    What is that supposed to mean? You can't have 100% safety at any speed. If it really is incumbent upon the driver to always drive at night in such a way that no collision can occur at all, then why not change the speed limit? My whole point is that it's not the driver's responsibility to account for every possible scenario. It can't be.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - favorited 8y ago
      It's not about accounting "for every possible scenario." Arizona has a Basic Speed Law, which says "A person must drive at a speed that is reasonable and prudent under the existing conditions." If the speed limit is 55 MPH, but conditions (rain, darkness, etc.) would prevent you from being able to safely stop in time to avoid a collision, then you are not allowed to drive at 55 MPH until conditions change.
    - anonymouz 8y ago
      Um, do you have a driver's license? Nobody said anything about 100% safety in some provable way. But certainly it is very much the driver's responsibility to pick a safe speed. Driver's Ed (at least in most? EU countries) teaches that the posted speed limit is just that, the maximum legally allowed speed. As a driver you -- and nobody else -- are responsible for picking a safe speed depending on the environmental conditions. In particular, the following are explicitly taught in Driver's Ed: 1) Don't overdrive your visibility (headlights, curve)... you must be able to look sufficiently far ahead such that you can stop in the event of an obstacle appearing. (In case of two-directional traffic in the same lane, you must be able to stop in half your visible distance.) 2) Reduce speed according to weather: Rain (aqua-planing), Snow/Ice (slippery), Fog (reduced visibility as in 1) 3) You must be aware of situational dangers and be ready to stop if necessary (e.g. parked cars on the side of the road between which children could emerge...) Nobody else will tell you what the maximum safe speed at any given moment is. You're supposed to learn how to handle your vehicle during driver's ed, and then act accordingly. Overdriving your visibility is just plain stupid -- you simply will not be able to avoid a collision with an object in time; you're basically driving blind and hoping for the best.
      - hazardmat 8y ago
        What is that supposed to mean? What's prudent and what is safe? The reality is that driving at night isn't safe at all and that people often can't avoid collision from an obstacle suddenly appearing at night. Maybe if they drove at 15MPH at all times, it would be possible in 99% of cases, but in practice we don't expect that. Hence, we have collisions. Not because the drivers are always guilty of recklessness, but because driving at night has a risk to it. That's the point.
- davidgould 8y ago
  Those deer are killed because thousands of humans aren't smart enough to not overdrive their headlights so they hit obstacles in the dark. Hitting a deer is not a small thing. You will seriously damage your car, and may be severely injured or killed yourself if the deer is tall enough to come through the windshield. In open range country you can also hit a cow. In some areas you can hit a moose. Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No, but we shouldn't drive like idiots either. It's not just "a driving risk taken", it's reckless and negligent behaviour.
  - docker_up 8y ago
    I've driven in Palo Alto near 280, and from the distance, in broad daylight, I saw a buck run across an entire field at full speed and straight across the road about 3-4 cars in front of me, and get hit by the car. There was no way the driver could see what I saw, and he had no chance to avoid it. The deer was simply acting irrationally. To say that people who hit deer are "driving like idiots" is wrong.
    - davidgould 8y ago
      I should probably let this go as it's off topic, but I don't understand the description of this incident: - Was this on 280, or near 280? - If the car that hit the deer was 3-4 cars ahead and you could see the deer "run across an entire field", why was "there no way the driver could see what you saw"? I'm trying to imagine what sort of obstruction could block the drivers view but not yours. - How fast was the car going? - How long did it take the deer to "run across an entire field"? - Normally deer are active around sunrise and sunset and bed down during the day (source: deer hunting). It seems odd to see a deer in running in "broad daylight".
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  > Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No, but we legally require drivers to modulate their speed to suit the conditions. > It's a driving risk taken, just like any other. So generous of drivers to take up that risk to others.
- cli 8y ago
  In British Columbia, the speed limit is defined as the maximum speed limit when the road is bare and dry and visibility is good. From the driver's guidebook[1]: >Aim for a speed that’s appropriate for the conditions in which you are driving. The posted speed is the maximum for ideal conditions only. Choose a slower speed if the conditions are not ideal — for instance, if the roads are slippery or visibility is limited. If a driver was driving too fast to react and stop without hitting that deer, then that driver was driving too quickly. [1] http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/driving-guides/Pages/Learn-to-Drive-Smart.aspx http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/driving-guides/Pages/Le...
- flogic 8y ago
  That's not really what tends to happen with deer. The situation starts with them on one side of the road deciding to cross. Then the partway through they freeze. There's often not time to react. Deer are very poorly adapted to dealing with roads. They're camouflaged which makes them hard to see. And while freeze is a perfectly good strategy against wolves, it absolutely sucks against a Buick.
- crististm 8y ago
  I have a question for you: did you create this account just to troll around?
jnwatson 8y ago
A self-driving car doesn’t need visible light to see a pedestrian. Between Lidsr and IR, she would have lit up like a Christmas tree.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  Sure, but my point is that whether or not the video was darkened (and regardless of how the car "sees") overdriving your radius of obstacle detection is an unsafe way to operate a vehicle.

wil421 8y ago

I can recall thinking the video was very bad quality. To the point where I was questioning if the video was from some dashcam they installed instead of the self driving car tech.

tlb 8y ago
The video was from a cheap dashcam, not any of the sensors the car uses. The LIDAR would have seen it clearly. So would your eyes, which have wider dynamic range than any but the best cameras.
- Spare_account 8y ago
  I recall noticing that the human driver of the car was not looking forwards immediately prior to the accident, which presumably makes him/her ultimately responsible for the accident?
  - atomical 8y ago
    If the breaks don't work because of an engineering defect who is responsible? In this case it's the LIDAR that failed.
    - swebs 8y ago
      The article said the LIDAR was fine. It was the decision making software that failed.
      - atomical 8y ago
        The decision making for the LIDAR?
        Piskvorrr 8y ago
        If I were to speculate: Decision making which takes LIDAR as one of the inputs.

ta9999999999999 8y ago

https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/977738312831066112 https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/977738312831066112

lhorie 8y ago

I highly doubt it, considering the video came from Tempe police, not Uber. Regardless, does it matter at this point? Uber is basically saying here that the sensors did detect the pedestrian but the issue was that the software to ignore false positives was tuned incorrectly.

assblaster 8y ago
Tempe police obtained the video from Uber, Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over. Uber has behaved badly in the past, and they had the motivation and past experience to do what it takes to advance their agenda. Remember, Uber terminated its autonomous driving testing as a result of this preventable tragedy.
- lhorie 8y ago
  > Tempe police obtained the video from Uber If by "from Uber", you mean they popped the SD card from the Uber-owner car's dashcam, sure. > Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over See my comment from the last time someone had suggested the idea of doctored videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644663
  - assblaster 8y ago
    What's the timeframe on the video being handled, given to police, etc. Do the police have the authority to take any video files recorded by a vehicle involved in an auto accident? Is a warrant needed? It's more likely that the police opened an investigation, and as part of the investigation, handed over dashcam footage. We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
    - lhorie 8y ago
      IIRC the video was released by the police the next day > We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident. From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour. Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.

hamitron 8y ago

It shouldn't matter at all how dark the roads were, the vehicle was equipped with LIDAR.

assblaster 8y ago
It's easy for Uber to point to this video to say: "Look know dark it was! If it was you driving, you'd be in the same problem we are in!" Look how much time has passed to learn of the fact that it was Uber's sloppy programming at fault in this tragedy. The good news for Uber is that this comes out far after the event when people are in general less likely to care, or even remember the details of the accident.
- hazardmat 8y ago
  The whole point of this piece is to put the blame on a human programmer, of course. What's there to "sloppily" program here? Most likely, somebody set an arbitrary threshold constant 0.05 too low. The data that threshold was working with will still have been provided by the machine learning system, which is opaque to humans. We'll have to face it that if we want self-driving cars, there isn't some magic procedure we can follow to not have accidents due to false classifications.

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago

The cameras used in applications like these are not like your typical 24-bit RGB cameras in phones or webcams that need gain adjustment: their sensors support a very high range of brightness values (like "high dynamic range") - but the video released to the public and the media would be MPEG/H.26x/etc which do not support HDR - or at least most video players wouldn't. The police probably lacked the expertise to know to demand the raw high-range camera data but instead just asked for "the video" and it's possible Uber deliberately took advantage of their ignorance to release a video that mitigates their culpability.

hcknwscommenter 8y ago
The video was not from a "high dynamic range" sensor, regardless of whether the car actually had one installed. I believe it did have such a "high dynamic range" sensor, which shows the blatant disregard for the truth that Uber is showing here by releasing such misleading video.
stefan_ 8y ago
The video was very obviously obtained from a dashcam solution that isn't actually used to do any of the autonomous driving. It's possible they don't even record the raw footage from the AI cameras, that's a huge bandwidth hog.
- freyir 8y ago
  They could easily buffer the last N minutes of recorded data in a black box. Not doing so would seem pretty irresponsible.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    Uber? Irresponsible? Inconceivable!

throwaway057 8y ago

I drive that stretch of road almost every single day, at night. Yeah, the video looked different than what my eyes see because my eyes have better low light sensitivity than most cameras. However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. A few weeks ago, I had somebody almost walk into my car out of the shadows (this person was paying attention though, and stopped in the empty lane next to me). It turns out it's REALLY difficult to see people in the streetlight shadows.

bkor 8y ago
> However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. There have been many videos on that same road which were super clear. Only the Uber video was really dark. The other videos weren't. Further, darkness doesn't impact LIDAR.
- Aspyre 8y ago
  If you want to compare conditions, were any of those videos taken without moon light? How do we know the city didn't increase the street lighting following the incident?

Piskvorrr 8y ago

I think it was just a choice of a crappy dashcam (intentional? IDK); someone coined the term "scapegoat camera" in one of the discussions. In other words, off-the-shelf dashcam equipment sucks in the dark and doesn't convey a realistic scene, no doctoring required. Here's a random piece of dashcam footage from elsewhere - watch for the pedestrians! https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM https://youtu.be/typj1asf1EM The video is unaltered - just crappy, they were actually clearly visible.