Apple Reveals Its Self-Driving Technology Called VoxelNet
In a paper, AI and machine learning researchers at Apple, have given us a sneak peek into the company’s new project.
For years now, Apple continues to deny being involved in working on self-driving technology. In 2015, the news spread of the company may be working on a car, but of course, Apple didn’t say a word to deny or acknowledge the news. Then in June, the company confirmed that it has been working on autonomous tech, calling it the ‘mother of all AI projects’, yet keeping any more insights unrevealed. However now, the company has shared a little sneak peek into the project.
First reported by TNW, Apple’s AI and machine learning researchers Yin Zhou and Oncel Tuzel, published a paper last week, which represented one of the first major breakthroughs we’ve seen from Apple’s self-driving project. Although the technology hasn’t been tested yet, it already seems like a notable development that could make rivals take notice.
As the paper reveals, the team working on the project has developed a new architecture for detecting small obstacles using the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensing method, called VoxelNet. Though, the researchers duly point out that the technology they have developed is better than LiDAR-based systems at spotting not just cars, but also pedestrians and cyclists.
The paper goes on to read, “VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR.”
Reportedly, Apple has been spotted testing its technology on roads in California, and even began trialing self-driving short-haul shuttles between its campuses earlier this year.
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