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I don't know how much is from knowing there was a truck in the road, but I noticed in my first viewing how something was blocking oncoming headlights. If you'r

I don't know how much is from knowing there was a truck in the road, but I noticed in my first viewing how something was blocking oncoming headlights. If you're going 75mph, that should really get your spidey-sense tingling. At least let off the accelerator/cancel cruise control. Be prepared to brake. Once you're closer and lined up, it's harder to tell there's anything going on because you're no longer approaching a bend with headlights on the other side of the truck, so by then it's too late. But this is, again, all hindsight talking. In the moment, it's much harder to assess how a "typical human" might have reacted, if at all.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Had the same feeling, incoming headlights are not visible = obstruction. pity the car has nothing that could be called intelligence. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the road thinking how I’d write a program to do it. Main thing I’d do differently is provide visual feedback of confidence. Having the autopilot disengage when it gets confused isn’t good enough, I want to know when the system is losing confidence /before/ it disengages, and I need it to let me know that it’s not 100% sure the next thousand feet of road is actually clear. Tesla seems to drive unperturbed until its classifier recognizes an obstacle.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  As someone who is a decent-ish programmer that's recently worked on recognition from videos, I would be totally lost trying to figure out how to handle a situation like this. As a human person (I swear!), I could see in the video that the headlights were being obstructed by something but, as a human programmer, I'm completely at a loss for how I would even determine if the headlights are blocked by something up close vs. far away using just the camera's view. Headlights get blocked by things all the time. How in the hell would you figure out that that's what's going on just by the visual? In other words, it's a good thing I don't make this stuff. My car would be phantom braking every 10 seconds, especially at night.
  - a_square_peg 5y ago
    Yeah, I've wondered about this too. If cars in the adjacent lanes slightly ahead of me braked all of sudden, I would brake too even if the road ahead of me is completely clear because I would think there is something going on. I wonder know how this type of thing gets programmed in to self-driving vehicles.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      Spoiler alert: It doesn't. It's almost completely based on the what the vehicle in front of you is doing.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I would definitely want night vision infrared, but my main strategy would be making sure the texture of the road surface is flowing toward me at the expected speed. I imagine I could use something like the motion vectors in mpeg compression. I would exploit the fact that the road 1000 feet away is coming at me slower than the road 100 feet away: if there is a visual texture in the middle of my field of view (where the horizon should be: road approaching relatively slowly), and it’s coming at me faster than 1000-feet-away asphalt ought to be, I assume the road is obstructed and slow down until I get a clear view again. Granted, I am a lowly web programmer with a hobbyist interest in compression, but I have thought about getting the comma.ai kit and learning how it works, trying to implement my own world modeling, but, sounds like a full time job :) EDIT: as for the headlights, I don’t want to act like I could whip this up in a weekend or anything, but having objects flicker in and out of existence would at least subtract a few points from my confidence score.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      That's an interesting way to go about it but would the texture of the road surface be consistent enough and reliable enough to make those calculations? This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I definitely do not have the confidence to do that. It's why machine learning is so scary to me. We're basically saying "I can't figure out all the possible permutations of this so let's throw them at a computer and hope it can do a better job".
soheil 5y ago
You have the advantage of knowing before hand something terrible is about to go down. The driver was probably driving for several hours at night and has his/her spidey-senses a bit fatigued.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  This is a dark truck with no lights in a high-speed road at night, I would probably have crashed too. Yes, human eyes have better night vision, but people have different visual acuity, attention span, and reflexes. Also, headlights from other cars can blind you momentarily. Still, I don't understand why Tesla is so opposed to LIDAR. The more information the autopilot has, the better decisions it can make.
  - soheil 5y ago
    Lidar is prohibitively expensive. There aren't a lot of manufacturers. Velodyne is pretty much the only game in town, they primarily sell to defense industry. GM via Cruise bought a startup that promised solid state lidar. It ended up being a complete waste of time.
mzkply 5y ago
man, until you said that, it wasn't something i had noticed, and I was staring straight at it with full attention. I can't imagine someone driving for hours picking that up. After all it could an obstruction in the median.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Had the same feeling, incoming headlights are not visible = obstruction. pity the car has nothing that could be called intelligence. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the road thinking how I’d write a program to do it. Main thing I’d do differently is provide visual feedback of confidence. Having the autopilot disengage when it gets confused isn’t good enough, I want to know when the system is losing confidence /before/ it disengages, and I need it to let me know that it’s not 100% sure the next thousand feet of road is actually clear. Tesla seems to drive unperturbed until its classifier recognizes an obstacle.

dkonofalski 5y ago
As someone who is a decent-ish programmer that's recently worked on recognition from videos, I would be totally lost trying to figure out how to handle a situation like this. As a human person (I swear!), I could see in the video that the headlights were being obstructed by something but, as a human programmer, I'm completely at a loss for how I would even determine if the headlights are blocked by something up close vs. far away using just the camera's view. Headlights get blocked by things all the time. How in the hell would you figure out that that's what's going on just by the visual? In other words, it's a good thing I don't make this stuff. My car would be phantom braking every 10 seconds, especially at night.
- a_square_peg 5y ago
  Yeah, I've wondered about this too. If cars in the adjacent lanes slightly ahead of me braked all of sudden, I would brake too even if the road ahead of me is completely clear because I would think there is something going on. I wonder know how this type of thing gets programmed in to self-driving vehicles.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    Spoiler alert: It doesn't. It's almost completely based on the what the vehicle in front of you is doing.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I would definitely want night vision infrared, but my main strategy would be making sure the texture of the road surface is flowing toward me at the expected speed. I imagine I could use something like the motion vectors in mpeg compression. I would exploit the fact that the road 1000 feet away is coming at me slower than the road 100 feet away: if there is a visual texture in the middle of my field of view (where the horizon should be: road approaching relatively slowly), and it’s coming at me faster than 1000-feet-away asphalt ought to be, I assume the road is obstructed and slow down until I get a clear view again. Granted, I am a lowly web programmer with a hobbyist interest in compression, but I have thought about getting the comma.ai kit and learning how it works, trying to implement my own world modeling, but, sounds like a full time job :) EDIT: as for the headlights, I don’t want to act like I could whip this up in a weekend or anything, but having objects flicker in and out of existence would at least subtract a few points from my confidence score.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    That's an interesting way to go about it but would the texture of the road surface be consistent enough and reliable enough to make those calculations? This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I definitely do not have the confidence to do that. It's why machine learning is so scary to me. We're basically saying "I can't figure out all the possible permutations of this so let's throw them at a computer and hope it can do a better job".

soheil 5y ago

You have the advantage of knowing before hand something terrible is about to go down. The driver was probably driving for several hours at night and has his/her spidey-senses a bit fatigued.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
This is a dark truck with no lights in a high-speed road at night, I would probably have crashed too. Yes, human eyes have better night vision, but people have different visual acuity, attention span, and reflexes. Also, headlights from other cars can blind you momentarily. Still, I don't understand why Tesla is so opposed to LIDAR. The more information the autopilot has, the better decisions it can make.
- soheil 5y ago
  Lidar is prohibitively expensive. There aren't a lot of manufacturers. Velodyne is pretty much the only game in town, they primarily sell to defense industry. GM via Cruise bought a startup that promised solid state lidar. It ended up being a complete waste of time.

mzkply 5y ago

man, until you said that, it wasn't something i had noticed, and I was staring straight at it with full attention. I can't imagine someone driving for hours picking that up. After all it could an obstruction in the median.