The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates provided by the government or whoever is responsible for road safety, free of charge (you're not directly paying for having signs on the road, why would you have to pay for an electronic version of that?).
Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous card do, so why not use it?
Introducing a single point of failure (1 database, across the internet), organized by a largely complex system (the DoT, possibly) to cope with an edge case doesn't feel like a very elegant solution.
A more costly, less elegant solution whose problem is already shared by street signs in general (meaning we could plan for it) would be RFID tags or something that tells the computer what sign this is if it can't read the sign. You could also use this for training, so it learns to filter away poorly drawn swastikas from the sign.
An attack on something like this would scale very poorly, as you would need physical access to all street signs. Issuing RFID to a street sign would be just another step along the manufacturing process of the sign, or as a step to the mounting of the sign.
This actually doesn't seem that far fetched. Ex-drivers who are angry and have plenty of time on their hands out at night picking the RFID tags out of stop signs.
Another scenario is more of a slow and steady war. I'd expect that autonomous vehicles will occasionally be alone and unoccupied, which makes them a tempting and defenseless target. You wouldn't even need to do any physical damage to disable them - just a little electrical tape over their sensors, or some chocks under their tires. Soon, the autonomous trucking cos have to employ some of the ex-truck drivers to go around re-enabling their vehicles. And of course, those ex-truck drivers are in cahoots with the disbalers. That could certainly drive down their savings on labor costs.
They would be most successful where population and sign density is high, which would be the cities. During such an attack, public transport could move around people while the authorities would take care of the attackers.
The problem for them is that where they would cause the most harm, rural areas (since they are in most dire need of supplies a few towns away and don't have any good alternatives to cars), is where such an attack would be the hardest to implement. Canada, Australia, Iceland and Alaska has many roads where vital street signs can be tens of miles apart from each other, as well any actual people who might be effected by this. Also, demographic movements is working to their disadvantage; more and more people everyday are moving to large cities.
In the US they can focus on just the interstates. And, they are unemployed, already used to long boring trips, and have established communication networks between them. Oh, and disenfranchised friends at the various rural truck stops and motels that will also be razed by self driving tech.
> Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous car[s] do, so why not use it?
Because you shouldn’t need to connect to the Internet and resolve GPS coordinates to know there’s a sign 50 meters away. If autonomous cars can’t "see" signs, let make them "see-able" with e.g. small radio transmitters along the road.
The issue is that upgrading every sign with a transmitter is costly, would require power and ongoing maintenance (not to mention vandalism - a sign is just metal and usually pretty resistant, but any electronics will be destroyed by vandals in no time).
An online database that can be cached (so you aren't in trouble if your network drops while you go through a tunnel or similar) is much cheaper to implement than upgrading physical signs.
This whole line of thought is somewhat beside the point, because the larger issue is not just about recognizing signs, but features of the visual field in general. If a system cannot be trusted to identify a road sign, I do not trust it to recognize a person.
The system cannot be trusted to recognise a road sign that has been very specifically adjusted to fool it, just like a person running into the road at night dressed in black is hard to see.
I'm not really concerned about the risk to humans that have been very precisely dressed to fool cars.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, until these systems can recognize that what they are seeing is not trustworthy like humans do on a day to day basis, the systems cannot be trusted or even depended on in a real world setting.
The larger systems can, just because the visual system says one thing doesn't mean it's trusted. Google made a short comment on it recently about cars with stickers of realistic scenes on them.
But in the context of deliberately hidden or altered pedestrians, there's no risk I can see here. The pedestrian would have to be trying to look like something else or hide in a very precise way, and they can do that to regular drivers right now.
The idea that this is only an issue of disguised pedestrians is a red herring that should not stop people considering the broader implications of the fragility of vision and other ML systems. When a system does not always function according to its intended purpose, it is sound engineering judgement to consider whether this has implications beyond the specific cases that have been found, and there have been some tragic outcomes when the people in charge found it expedient to not do so. In the case of ML, the principle that systems can generalize appropriately beyond their training sets is central, and anything that raises concerns over the generality of that capability needs to be taken seriously. You can certainly hold the opinion that it will not turn out to be a major problem, but the burden of proof lies with those claiming that the systems (after modification, if necessary) are safe enough, and avoiding the question is the opposite of discharging that burden.
Since the sign is just metal, it could serve as the antenna. Bury the transmitter beneath the ground, there you could also hook it up to the power grid (unless you use the sign's surface to act as a solar panel). I would like to see vandals mess with that.
However, it ain't cheap and simple to implement, I agree with that. In countries like Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada and Australia they probably have the means to outfit their cities since they have the wealth to do it, but the rural areas would be a real challenge since they are so sparsely populated even when the money is there. In contrast to when these countries pioneered the implementation of the Internet, there's nothing like the phone network to piggy back this time.
> The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates
Why does everyone think self driving cars can use GPS to identify sign locations? GPS is not accurate enough to do that, and the labeling would need to be done by hand, which is not feasible. Plus, signs change and move around, making the labeling task endless.
One solution is to add redundancy. A stop sign, for example, could broadcast a low-power radio signal, and be accompanied by a retro-reflective strip with a coded pattern on the side of the road leading up to it, and emit tones at particular ultrasonic frequencies…
GPS could be a part of this, but it's easy to imagine what could go wrong. Somebody mistakenly installs a stop sign without updating the database. Another person makes a mistake configuring a cache parameter and the CDN starts serving up last year's map. There's a whole class of problems eliminated by keeping the information local. Imagine if you had to drive looking only at road information served over the internet -- would you trust it?
Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous card do, so why not use it?