Monkey see, monkey drive

Autonomous cars are a fantastic concept and, for some like me, a long awaited develpment. I yearn for a world where car accidents are not a steady factory of corpses, everywhere in the world. A world where I can be in my car with my family having a good time while going from one place to another without having to stare at the road.

Surely, there are huge efforts to make autonomous cars a practical reality beyond small town cities and very well groomed roads. What puzzles me is that most of these efforts concentrate on making cars “see” just as we humans do. This, we know, is a huge technological feat.

Being an image processing/computer vision researcher and engineer, I am impressed with the advancements made in recent years.

However, as an Engineer (period), I cannot stop thinking about the overall engineering task and ask myself: “is it really necessary to make cars see as we do”? I don’t think so!

Now, many would tell me, one has to use the traffic infrastructure already in place, which is full of visual cues: lights, signs, roadmarks, etc, intended for humans to see. Now, building and maintaining such infrastructure costs a lot of money. Also, the complexity required for a car to *see* and react to these marks reliably as we do is also very high.

On the other hand, electronic devices have a whole array of alternate and more effective means of comunication and location. All those signs that we read could come with simple transmitters or electronic marks (e.g., RFIDs) which could be safely interpreted by an autonomous car. Autonomous cars can also communicate with other cars and avoid accidents.

So, instead of beefing up the Computer Vision of cars, why not invest in defining and using standards for AV communications and signaling? Given the current advancements in digital communications and electronics, this would be very cheap to deploy, and extremely reliable.

Sure, there is the major issue of not running over people and animals or stumbling with objects on the street. However, by focusing only on these subjects instead of trying to do everything at once, the CV machinery of cars could be simpler and safer.

Just saying.