Self-driving cars fail to detect dark-skinned pedestrians

I do not like the conclusion of the article.

Increasing the diversity of the team members might be good for reducing bias, but the fact remains that darker skinned people are harder for machine vision systems to work with due to the lack of contrast.

Like that fuss a few years ago with the laptops (I want to say it was Toshiba but I'm not certain) not being able to use facial recognition to unlock the OS.

Also, this seems to be only vision systems - you'd hope LIDAR would be able to detect a pedestrian regardless of skin color.

Step 1 - find an object detection model that's not used in self-driving cars

Step 2 - show that the model detects dark-skinned pedestrians 5% less often than light-skinned pedestrians

Step 3 - write a clickbait title implying that self-driving cars will run down dark-skinned pedestrians with precisely zero evidence

Step 4 - post the article on HN with an even more inflammatory title than the actual article

> The report [...] hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. It didn’t test any object-detection models actually being used by self-driving cars, nor did it leverage any training datasets actually being used by autonomous vehicle manufacturers.

How information gets propagated in 2019:

1. The study talks about how some vision-based object detection systems don't work as well on black people.

2. The articles makes the leap to self driving cars, ignoring that self driving cars uses Lidar and probably custom made algorithms. To their credit they do say that it's a "potential risk".

3. Everybody shares (including this HN submission) or rewrite the article dropping the "potential" part.

Sounds like a physical issue, about how dark surfaces reflect less light and the car can't analyze that information. They'll find a way to fix this eventually.

For those interested in learning more about these problems there are two interesting book to read. "Technicaly Wrong" and "Weapons of Math Destruction"

how do idiots blame bias for everything? if you have a dark room of course it’ll be harder to detect a dark skin person! the same with a couch that’s black instead of white.

surely this is simple physics (white surfaces reflect more light), rather than algorithmic bias