If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything that encode information to help computers figure out what they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-readable markers on roads and posts and traffic signs. I'm still hoping someone will wake up and make use of this "cheat code".
At least from an IR perspective, it was generally loved by nearly everyone we spoke to, but there was no takers in the end due to the IR requirement and such cameras not being everywhere yet.
Here is a link to some of our first work. That picture of a stop sign is our first prototype with hand cut special film.
https://www.businessinsider.com/3m-hides-tech-in-sides-to-he...
> but there was no takers in the end due to the IR requirement and such cameras not being everywhere yet
I wonder why that's the case. What kind of IR camera it required? I was under the impression that turning a regular camera into an IR one was just a matter of digging out its IR filter and replacing it with a visible light filter. Or did it require the kind of cameras that are used in thermal imaging? Unfortunately, I don't really know what the technical and business challenges are for ubiquitous IR. Could you share some information about it?
Many cars use front facing cameras that with minimal adjustment could read at the proper wave lengths, but one issue for a lot of vehicles right now is that the windshield has an IR filter to minimize heat and interior damage. For cameras behind the rear view mirror, the standard windshield creates an issue. Windshields with a small cut of the film would be sufficient, but they are not manufactured to my knowledge.
For general fiducials not related to these, I had hoped to put them everywhere. Think even hidden everywhere and read by phones. But at least for a while I think the read facing cameras on phones will continue to have the filter and using the phone backwards with the front facing camera is awkward.
The idea behind adding special markings for computers is that you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to perfect algorithms interpreting signage optimized for human consumption, or... you can spend much less time and effort, to much better effect, setting up additional signage that's easy for computers to consume and provides information relevant to computers (which is not necessarily the same as what humans need).
Note that roads are controlled, artificial environments. There's always someone responsible for maintaining a road and signage on it. The infrastructure to deploy additional markings dedicated to self-driving cars already exist.
Humans rely on road lines and signs as well and when those are covered, human capability is reduced and they have to drive slower.
The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains are cheap in comparison.
They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation “for free.” (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch of them all over a deformable object to map back the shape and deformation.... without lengthy registration and with only a single camera... unlike vidicon) And they’re easy to implement in software. Can be extremely fast (<10ms... no real limit as you can implement it in an FPGA) and fairly lightweight and can use basically any kind of digital camera (good or bad).
It's easier to get money for a futuristic sounding project than for routine shoring up of infrastructure so it doesn't keep falling apart. (Just like many codebases)
Google, among others, is using private (external, not owned or controlled by google) wi-fi access points as radio beacons for navigation today. Good old wardriving google. This is one factor facilitating navigation in cities when GPS is spotty. And then you have cell towers.
Centralized, standardized navigation facilitation solutions would be better, more reliable, not require mobile internet access for alignment with beacons, as they would be in a stored database in the vehicle, etc.
With machine-readable signage based on fiducials, not only can you error-correct the signage (making it highly resistant to simple alterations and ambiguous readings), you can also encrypt it and get 6 degree of freedom vehicle vs signage pose information. All from a single camera view. That makes it MUCH more resistant to abuse than machine-learning of human-readable signage... arguably more resistant to abuse even than human readable signage is to humans.
(Also, I’ve thought of additional ways that fiducials could be resistant to such measures.)
Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't continue improving the technology.
One time many many years ago I went to kinkos and printed giant fiducial squares like 48"x48" and wheat pasted them all over Austin, TX to do large at scale AR with markers. Just putting giant dongs on down town condos and stuff. Good times.
Then you could zone off areas that are designated safe for self-driving, among other things.
Error detecting and correcting signage would be able to correct or at least detect the error, and it’s also possible to encrypt or, um, sign the signage. None of those are terribly feasible with human readable signage.
A human can take a crowbar to a railroad track. A human can drop a brick from an overpass. But modifying a signed and error corrected fiducial is gonna be pretty tough.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-...
Human readable signage is potentially much easier to attack than machine-readable signage.
Physical world has a much different threat model than the Internet.
Since your solution is based on sending someone to mark the roads, why not use the same someone to simply build a map of the road, Google Maps style with higher accuracy? I think there are a few startups doing just that now.
Because it's incredibly vulnerable in an adversarial world. (Human readable has a human in the loop, and so can adjust for the worst adversarial attacks. Machine readable can't)
Scania has a self driving truck convoy where a manned truck is followed by several driver less trucks using such beacons. It is not a trivial solution once you dig into it- normal wifi is too slow at highway speeds, and once the air is congested and re-transmissions occur it is even slower. Scania is using 802.11p [1] and still has backups for when connection is lost or delayed.
[1] https://www.nxp.com/products/wireless/dsrc-safety-modem/road...
