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Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 22-11-2017<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \n Technology company Apple\u2019s scientists have released research on how self-driving cars can better spot cyclists and pedestrians while using fewer sensors.<\/p>\n The research posted on line appears to be the company\u2019s first publicly disclosed paper on autonomous vehicles.<\/p>\n Reuters reports that the paper by Yin Zhou and Oncel Tuzel, submitted on 17 November to independent online journal arXiv, is significant because Apple\u2019s famed corporate secrecy around future products has been seen as a drawback among artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers.<\/p>\n The scientists proposed a new software approach called “VoxelNet” for helping computers detect three-dimensional objects.<\/p>\n Self-driving cars often use a combination of normal two-dimensional cameras and depth-sensing \u201cLiDAR\u201d units to recognize the world around them.<\/p>\n While the units supply depth information, their low resolution makes it hard to detect small, faraway objects without help from a normal camera linked to it in real time.<\/p>\n But with new software, the Apple researchers said they were able to get \u201chighly encouraging results\u201d in spotting pedestrians and cyclists with just LiDAR data.<\/p>\n Though Chief Executive Tim Cook has called self-driving cars \u201cthe mother of all AI projects,\u201d Apple has given few hints about the nature of its self-driving car ambitious.<\/p>\n Last December, Apple told federal regulators it was excited about the technology and asked regulators not to restrict testing of the technology.<\/p>\n In April, Apple filed a self-driving car testing plan with California.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n