While he was only scratching his face behind the wheel, a Dutch driver received, with supporting photo, a fine of 380 euros, after being wrongly flashed by a radar. Since then, he has been fighting to have the sanction overturned.
You can’t call while driving, but soon you won’t even be able to scratch your head while driving. The story will seem ludicrous to you, but it is undoubtedly not an isolated case, as technology is as omnipresent as it is imperfect in our lives, even in the radars that monitor us in cars. Tim Hanssen, who, to make matters worse, is a specialist in image analysis, received a fine justified by a phone call while driving… even though he was not holding any object in his hand. No, Tim had the good (rather, bad) idea of scratching the right side of his face as he walked in front of the camera.
The driver who was scratching his head is having a hard time making the Dutch administration listen to reason
Since last November, Tim has been fighting hard against the Dutch authorities, to cancel the fine of 380 euros that he must pay, not counting the 9 euros in administrative costs. Convinced that, that day, he was not calling while driving, the Dutchman requested the supposedly incriminating photo from the local Judicial Recovery Center (CJIB), equivalent of the French ANTAI (National Agency for Automated Crime Processing). .
There, it’s amazement! The photo confirms that Tim Hanssen was not holding an object in his hand, but was simply scratching part of his face. However, he was indeed sanctioned, but then why? Tim is actually the victim of a false positive from the crime detection algorithm.
In the Netherlands, and this is also valid in other countries such as France, radars are today intelligent cameras, which operate using artificial intelligence which makes it possible to detect that we are wearing well your seat belt, that you don’t phone while driving, or that you stop at a red light. Mr. Hanssen then tried to understand the algorithm that punished him.
The algorithm is far from infallible, and Tim Hanssen has proven it outright
Good thing Tim Hanssen tried to replicate the offense. To do this, he used the real-time object detection algorithm YOLO (“You Only Look Once”), which reproduces the same pattern that pinned him by mistake. And it turns out that by holding his empty hand to his ear, the algorithm still detected the presence of a phone. His analysis and recommendation for improvement are particularly interesting.
“ It could well be that the training dataset (Editor’s note: from the algorithm) contains few or no photos of people sitting with an empty hand on their ear. In this case, the fact that the phone is actually held in the hand becomes less important for the algorithm, but it is enough if the hand is close to the ear. To improve this, more photos should be added where the hand is empty, preferably at least a few hundred photos. »
The worst part of this case is that Tim was not only the victim of an algorithmic error: he is also the victim of a human error. Because if an algorithm determines that someone is holding a smartphone while driving, a police officer, a very human one, must confirm the offense. Which he did, wrongly. The driver must now defend himself in court. Here’s one who hasn’t left the inn yet!
Source : nippur.nl
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