Image Recognition

Image Recognition

               Image recognition is a large and vast field. Self-driving cars use it to distinguish road signs and markings while Google Photos uses it to recognize objects in photos and group photos together by type. These image recognition software tools use supervised learning to help guide the image recognition to determine what it sees in the photo. Supervised learning requires a human to show the program a bunch of images and categorize them for the program. The human must specify what is in each photograph. The program will then be able to make guesses on what objects it sees in new images presented to it based on the examples it was given from the human trainer.

               An example of this image recognition being used in self-driving cars is the company Comma.ai. Comma.ai is a small company that is working on retrofitting current cars with additional hardware that will allow limited self-driving on highways. The company will add a camera onto the car that uses image recognition software to determine where to drive the car. Before Comma.ai puts this product into production, they need to train it with supervised learning. Comma.ai released a phone app that you can use while driving. This app will record the road in front of your car and send videos and pictures to the company. This will gather lots of real world training data for Comma.ai to use when training its algorithm.

Comma.ai also released another tool that will allow normal people to train its algorithm. They put up a web tool that will display an image they received from their user-base. The user of the web tool will then be able to label parts of the image. For example, the user can mark they sky, road, cars, signs, road markings, and other parts of the image. These users are acting as trainers for the algorithm. The algorithm will take all these examples and will then be trained to determine what is in a certain image on its own. This will allow the algorithm to be deployed into a car. The product will then be able to determine what is on the road ahead of the car and drive the car accordingly.

This supervised learning is crucial in teaching the car to know what it is looking at on the road. This is not the whole picture, though. The car must still know what to do with the data is has acquired from the photos. It can determine that there are lines on the road, but it still needs to know that it must drive on the right side of a double yellow line, for example. Other algorithms along with supervised learning are required to come together to make self-driving technology.