13 ms·
Pedestrian detection systems don’t work well, AAA finds
- surfmike 7y agoActual studies show it decreases rear end collisions around 40% and pedestrian insurance claims 35% http://bestride.com/news/new-study-by-iihs-shows-automatic-emergency-braking-dramatically-reduces-accidents-with-injuries-in-gm-vehicles http://bestride.com/news/new-study-by-iihs-shows-automatic-e...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jimrandomh 7y agoLooking at the methodology here, I don't think this test is likely to be representative. There are two important differences between a test dummy and a pedestrian. First: pedestrians glow in infrared; and second, pedestrians move, even if it's only shifting in place. Both of these features of pedestrians are extremely useful for a sensor that needs to find them, so I expect using a still, cold dummy to make them perform worse than they would in the real world.
- magicalist 7y ago> Looking at the methodology here I don't think this test is likely to be representative There are two important differences between a test dummy and a pedestrian. First: pedestrians glow in infrared; and second, pedestrians move, even if it's only shifting in place. The dummies were articulated, moved, and designed to mimic the infrared response of a real human. See section 4.2.
- 05 7y ago> ..pedestrians glow in infrared; .. > ..using a still, cold dummy.. The kind of infrared you're thinking of is probably not the kind the sensor can detect. Only thermal imaging cameras can detect far infrared range - the one that can help distinguish hot objects from cold ones. 'Normal' IR cameras only capture near infrared - which tells you nothing about the temperature.
- chronic71819 7y ago> The kind of infrared you're thinking of is probably not the kind the sensor can detect. Only thermal imaging cameras Parent is talking about far-infrared (ie, thermal) sensors. Many car models have high-resolution thermal sensors.
- 05 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_night_vision#Automobiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_night_vision#Automo... Tested cars unlikely to have the feature
- Sinergy2 7y agoAutomotive night vision is expensive and unusual.
- Alex3917 7y agoIt's weird that they didn't include Subaru's eyesight system, given that it generally performs much better than Tesla. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-features-automatic-braking-system-tested-explained/ https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a24511826/safety-featu...
- kbos87 7y agoAgree completely - Eyesight impresses me on a regular basis on the complexity of scenarios it seems to be able to react to, both when it comes to collision alerts / automatic breaking and when used for assisted cruise control. I haven’t had any experiences with pedestrians at speed in front of the vehicle, but the rear automatic breaking in my Subaru is very aware of / sensitive to people walking behind it.
- parsimo2010 7y agoJust because they aren't perfect doesn't mean they don't make your car safer. The writing here almost sounds like the author would prefer not having it. Having AEB on your car can't make it more dangerous unless the AEB system accelerates into pedestrians. You have two options- 1. A car that only brakes when you react 2. A car that brakes when you react, and also sometimes when you don't. The only way that AEB might conceivably make you less safe is if you pick up bad driving habits because you expect the all-knowing robot to keep you safe. This certainly applies to some people, but that's the person's fault, not the manufacturers fault for rolling out systems that are better than nothing, even if they aren't perfect. Edit: I'll acknowledge that unexpected braking events might mean that AEB equipped cars have a higher risk of being rear-ended, but this test was about pedestrian safety. I'm including this edit just because I know someone will bring it up thinking it proves that they are smart even if it wasn't the point of the study.
- pmoriarty 7y agoAbrupt, unexpected breaking could cause a rear-end collision, which could conceivably kill quite a few more people than if the breaking had not occurred. Imagine a car breaking hard directly in front of 16-wheel semi-trailer. That could lead to a pile-up and quite a few people dead.
- JaggedJax 7y agoHow is this different from a human slamming on the breaks to avoid the accident? Or a human crashing into the truck. These situations can also lead to a rear end collision the same was as AEB would.
- u801e 7y agoA lot of drivers also look ahead of the vehicle directly ahead of them, so they have some sense of when the vehicle in front of them is likely to slow down so that they can be better prepared to slow down themselves. If the AEB has a false positive and suddenly slows the vehicle, it would likely catch drivers following that vehicle off guard.
- kgwxd 7y agoTouchscreen dash; training people to expect their car will do stuff for them (beep if something is behind, alert if someones in the next lane, break if something is in the way, drive); cellphones (both drivers and pedestrians); pedestrian crosswalks in the middle of busy roads with new signaling most drivers have never been formally trained on; motorcycle lanes between car lanes; bike lanes on the side of the road, sometimes second lane from the side, sometimes on thruways. The list goes on and it's getting worse everyday. Keep it simple stupid.
- Robotbeat 7y agoSo one good thing about the (perhaps unfair? perhaps disproportionate?) media attention that failures of semi-autonomous systems get, over the long term I'm pretty sure it helps focus the teams to make the tech better. It's how aviation got insanely safe. Every passenger airplane crash is scrutinized. The very distortion in thinking that makes people think flying in airplanes is more dangerous than cars is what motivates every crash to be scrutinized.
- tremon 7y agoIt's how aviation got insanely safe Not by media attention though; it took an authoritative, hard-line government body to reach that level.
- unsignedchar 7y agoLast time this was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21151117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21151117
- jaimex2 7y agoNCAP footage seems to show the opposite. https://youtu.be/cMiZa3HgRVE?t=125 https://youtu.be/cMiZa3HgRVE?t=125 The systems work as described and don't claim to work in every scenario. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_3_owners_manual_north_america_en.pdf#page=93 https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_3_owners_man...
- zaroth 7y agoI’ve seen that NCAP video and was really impressed by it at the time. It doesn’t jive with the results in TFA at all - where it sounds like the Tesla (and most of the other cars they tested) hit the dummy every time, and often never even slowed down. I wonder how to explain the disparity. Could the video you linked have been taken with AutoPilot enabled maybe?
- ummonk 7y agoFrom reading the description it seems like AAA used tests where there was a bend in the road and / or the pedestrian was moving across so they weren't actually in the path of the vehicle until a couple seconds before impact. These systems are going to be conservative in classifying potential obstacles as in need of emergency braking, as they should be - you don't for example want your car slamming the brakes because it sees a pedestrian on the sidewalk next to the lane you're driving on. That said, it should be noted that the Honda Accord actually did quite well in these tests.
- mindfulplay 7y agoIt's a bit scary that the Tesla Model 3 doesn't fare well at all.. and this is the same company shipping live metal torpedoes in parking lots via the Summon feature. Scary.
- jabedude 7y agoI think this is a little over the top. Vehicles being summoned have a top speed of 5 MPH, hardly a "torpedo".
- m0zg 7y agoFYI, worth reiterating, a deep learning vision system will not necessarily recognize a dummy as a human. Particularly if it operates in both visible and IR spectrum.
- drabiega 7y agoThat's a fair point which also occurred to me while reading the article. It is, I think, indicative of a deeper issue with using ML in these sorts of safety contexts. If the only way to really test your safety system is to actually put people in danger your whole concept may be problematic.
- m0zg 7y agoThat's why Tesla's approach is pretty brilliant IMO. It's easy to collect samples where there was hard braking and there was a real, actual human visible in the path of the car while the car is under human control. No dummies are needed, and AI was not in control of the car, so there's no ethics issue either. Your Tesla will upload such samples automatically if Tesla deep learning system wants them.
- tom_ 7y agoOnce I'd had it pointed out to me that these articles go out of their way never to refer to people on foot as actual people, I just can't unsee it. The only thing referred to as human here is the driver, and the only person whose safety is discussed is the driver. Clearly at some point during the composition process the writer got bored of using the term "pedestrian", because it looks like he hit up the thesaurus, discovered the term "biped", and decided that would be a good term to use. (But I bet you a fiver these cars won't stop for kangaroos or ostriches other than as part of some generic collision avoidance system.) In the writer's defence, the sentence about the driver's safety is a mite ambiguous - but it could have been more explicit, so I'm going to be uncharitable here. And I do give him points for sneaking the term "run people over" in the last sentence, because he could so easily have referred to it as an accidental unavoidable pedestrian collision incident or something.
- atoav 7y agoEntire cities are built around our love for cars — the ideology of the superiority and desireability of cars is deeply buried within the fibre of society. It could be that the author thinks they are just being neutral, while the neutral thing would be to describe this technology as something that regulates the interaction between equally valuable human beeings. This is car culture 101: expensive Cars (and their drivers) are the top of the foodchain, cyclists and pedestrians are the bottom. Depending on where you live this might differ (e.g. in the Netherlands cyclists are on the same level as motorists and you can really see it in the architecture).
- xapata 7y ago> Entire cities And the modern police force.
- jakobegger 7y agoTo me, the term "bipeds" seemed like a stylistic choice to emphasize the shortcomings of the systems -- the algorithms are not sophisticated enough to understand what a "person" is, so the author used a different word to emphasize that fact. And the rest of the article is about a test with crash dummies. Why would the author talk about "people" when the tests were performed with dummies?
- mister_hn 7y agowelcome to real-world, where out-of-labs conditions are far harder than expected.
- HeraldEmbar 7y agoNow let's put a person talking on the phone and texting at the same time and have that person do the same exercise that AAA conducted..
- w_t_payne 7y agoI have former colleagues working on some of these systems, and they tell me some pretty scary horror stories of the simple and obvious ways in which they fail. Some of the stories that I have heard just blow my mind - and seem all-too-reminiscent of the VW emissions-test defeat-device scandal.
- vegardx 7y agoThere's so much talk about false-positives in this thread, but I have yet to experience that on my own car, even when people cut me off dangerously close. Not once has AEB mistakenly been activated by the car.
- hermitdev 7y agoMy car doesn't have AEB, but it does have the front collision warning sensors. I get plenty of false alarms, particularly with an S-turn (quick right then left turn). On the final turn, there's a guard rail which sets off the FCW about 25% of the time I drive through there.
- sunstone 7y agoThese systems would work better if people were made out of metal.
- davinic 7y agoWhat is the reasoning for the vehicle not also sounding its horn while it's braking?
- chickenpotpie 7y agoProbably because it's only legal to use the horn if it's to avoid an accident, but it's almost always legal to use the brakes.