Self-Driving Cars May Be Biased Against Skin Color, Children

Autonomous vehicles may have more difficulty in detecting children and people with darker skin, according to a new study. The study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, required data sets that include demographic labels for pedestrians. However, as the paper, “Unmasking Fairness Issues of Autonomous Driving Systems” noted, the commonly-used data sets for pedestrian detection often lack labels of this nature. As such, the only option was to manually add labels to four data sets, which resulted in a collection of 8,311 real-world images annotated with 16,070 gender labels, 20,115 age labels and 3,513 skin tone labels. This is especially worrying, given that car manufacturers and AV developers are likely using similar software and data sets in the development process.