{"id":1541,"date":"2020-12-02T19:43:48","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T19:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1330308"},"modified":"2020-12-02T19:43:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T19:43:48","slug":"how-ai-powered-video-compression-could-make-an-honest-man-out-of-elon-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=1541","title":{"rendered":"How AI-powered video compression could make an honest man out of Elon Musk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cLIDAR is a fool\u2019s errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed! Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It\u2019s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it\u2019s ridiculous, you\u2019ll see.\u201d Elon Musk, April 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tesla\u2019s approach to driverless vehicle technology has been controversial at best<\/a>. A series of increasingly poor marketing and branding choices<\/a> have made it difficult to ascertain exactly what the company\u2019s actual benchmark for autonomous driving is.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, it\u2019s clear that Tesla has one of the world\u2019s most advanced driver-assistance features. Teslas are among the safest vehicles a human could drive. Yet, on the other hand, the company is probably years away from developing a product that doesn\u2019t come with a warning for drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times and be prepared to take over at a split-second\u2019s notice.<\/p>\n

The competition, however, has already moved past that stage.<\/p>\n

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Yep, we specialize in zero intervention driving. Check out our steering wheel labels. \ud83d\ude98\ud83e\udd16\ud83d\ude80 pic.twitter.com\/WpYopuS3SW<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Waymo (@Waymo) October 8, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a bit unfair to compare Waymo and Tesla \u2013 though, I should point out, Tesla CEO Elon Musk invites these things when he trolls his competition under the guise of discourse \u2013 because the companies are trying to accomplish two entirely different things.<\/p>\n

Waymo\u2019s laying the ground work for a fleet of robotaxis that likely won\u2019t have a steering wheel, driver\u2019s seat, or cockpit of any kind. Tesla is trying to create the ultimate experience for car owners. While it may seem that for each the ultimate goal is L4\/L5 autonomy, how they\u2019re approaching it couldn\u2019t be more different.<\/p>\n

In the AI world L4 and L5 refer to levels of autonomy. It\u2019s a bit complex, but the muddy version is that a car that can drive itself without outside assistance but can still be driven or operated by humans displays level 4 autonomy, and when you take out human intervention all-together you hit level 5.<\/p>\n

Waymo relies on cameras and LIDAR-based sensor packages<\/a> for its robotaxis\u2019 self-driving capabilities where, as you can tell from the above Musk quote, Tesla repudiates the usefulness of LIDAR in such endeavors. The Musk-run outfit puts more emphasis on computer vision<\/a> as the focal point of its so-called \u201cFull Self Driving\u201d system.<\/p>\n

In execution this means, like any other video-based system, Teslas probably have to deal with the inherent latency involved in using state-of-the-art video codecs. It doesn\u2019t matter how advanced and powerful your machine learning algorithms are if they\u2019re waiting around for video signals to get sorted out.<\/p>\n

Remember when a man died in a Tesla Model S that failed to distinguish a white truck in a highway intersection from the clouds in the sky<\/a>? It\u2019s easy to imagine such an error wouldn\u2019t have happened if the AI had higher resolution real-time video that properly highlighted the important information in the scene which unfolded in the final seconds before impact.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t think about it, but video codecs are a crucial backbone technology today. The Cliff\u2019s Notes version of what they do is this: videos are too big to stream in their native size so they have to be compressed to send and decompressed to view. Codecs are what handles the compressing and decompressing.<\/p>\n

When you think about compressing and decompressing videos for live streaming \u2013 whether on YouTube, Twitch gaming, or to an AI processor inside of a car \u2013 you have to take into account all the processing power it takes.<\/p>\n

Modern codecs are great for what they do. You\u2019ve probably heard of things like MPEG-4 and HVEC-H.265 or even DivX, well those are codecs. They let you watch videos that, otherwise, would have to be the size of a thumbnail or sent in tiny bursts (remember when everything was always buffering?). But they aren\u2019t quite good enough for autonomous vehicles yet.<\/p>\n

Tech Crunch\u2019s Devin Coldewey yesterday published an in-depth piece<\/a> on AI startup WaveOne<\/a>, a company that appears to be developing an AI-powered video compression system that could revolutionize the video industry as a whole.<\/p>\n

And yes, the article addresses the fact that every five or six months some outfit comes along claiming to have created the One True Codec to Rule Them All only to find out that \u201cstandards\u201d don\u2019t just conform to your work because you\u2019ve got a good idea.<\/p>\n

It turns out that running some of these software solutions requires specific hardware, an obstacle that prevents most \u201cnew and improved\u201d codecs from ever even entering the marketplace. WaveOne\u2019s work could change that. According to Coldewey\u2019s piece:<\/p>\n

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Just one problem: when you get a new codec, you need new hardware.<\/p>\n

But consider this: many new phones ship with a chip designed for running machine learning models, which like codecs can be accelerated, but unlike them the hardware is not bespoke for the model. So why aren\u2019t we using this ML-optimized chip for video? Well, that\u2019s exactly what WaveOne intends to do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

WaveOne\u2019s designed their algorithms to run on AI chips. That means it\u2019ll work natively on iPhones, Samsung devices, and most flagship phones in 2021 and beyond. And, of course, they\u2019d work with whatever camera systems companies such as Tesla are using in their self-driving vehicles.<\/p>\n

The key part here is, as Coldewey writes, that WaveOne\u2019s system is purported to halve processing times while increasing image quality. Something that could be huge for self-driving cars. Coldewey continues:<\/p>\n

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A self-driving car, sending video between components or to a central server, could save time and improve video quality by focusing on what the autonomous system designates important \u2014 vehicles, pedestrians, animals \u2014 and not wasting time and bits on a featureless sky, trees in the distance, and so on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This seems pretty close to a eureka moment. WaveOne\u2019s tech doesn\u2019t require consumers to do anything except keep buying new technology devices like they always have. And businesses won\u2019t have to invest in a hardware ecosystem to get the benefits of the new, better video compression services. That means if everything pans out like this research paper<\/a> seems to indicate it will, WaveOne\u2019s future is bright.<\/p>\n

And, potentially, so is the self-driving car industry\u2019s. If an advance like this can keep Tesla\u2019s cars from thinking trucks are clouds, it could represent a major leap for computer vision-based autonomous vehicle technology.<\/p>\n

And not a moment too soon, because Musk has less than a month to make good on his guarantee that Tesla would be operating 1,000,000 robotaxis by the end of 2020<\/a>. So far the company\u2019s managed to produce exactly zero.<\/p>\n

Published December 2, 2020 \u2014 19:43 UTC <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLIDAR is a fool\u2019s errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed! Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It\u2019s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}