Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists
Summary
In collaboration with colleagues, Dr Jie Zhang from the Department of Informatics at King’s College London, assessed eight artificial intelligence (AI) powered pedestrian detection systems used in autonomous vehicle research. They found through testing over 8,000 images through these pieces of software that detection accuracy for adults was almost 20% higher than it was for children, and just over 7.5% more accurate for light-skinned pedestrians compared to their darker-skinned counterparts. Car manufacturers don’t release the details of the software they use for pedestrian detection, but as they are usually built upon the same open-source systems we used in our research, we can be quite sure that they are running into the same issues of bias. The researchers now hope that manufacturers will be more transparent when it comes to how their commercial pedestrian detection AI models are trained, as well as how they perform, before they hit the streets. As AI becomes more and more integrated into our daily lives, from the types of cars we ride, to the way we interact with law enforcement, this issue of fairness will only grow in importance.”