Re:Tesla Model S Autopilot Features
by gambiting on Thursday October 15, 2015 @05:04AM
(#10392100)
Our best of the best image recognition tech cannot see a difference between a zebra, and a sofa in a zebra print. I think "reading hand signals of a policeman/workman on the road" is far far far beyond what we can currently do. Or rather - I'm sure we can make a solution which will work right now, in perfect conditions. I'm sure it will fail in the dark/rain/snow or if the worker is making small gestures near his hip rather than moving hands high up in the air. There's just so much uncertainty in driving that I think for cars to be absolutely 100% automated, where you can genuinely go to sleep when the car drives, the roads would need to be 100% automated as well, with beacons everywhere. That will probably happen, but it's definitely not "3 years away".
[ Parent
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Zebra vs. zebra-patterned sofa is a kind of problem designed to be hard for image processing algorithms. From the practical point of view however, you just have to require that policemen / construction workers wear specific patterns on the uniforms or even have special IR-reflective buttons/threads. That would solve like 95% of cases, and by the time self-driving cars become the norm, we'll have figured out at least some specific algorithms for that very purpose that would work in general case.