Driverless Cars Can Be Tricked into Seeing Red Traffic Lights as Green

Researchers at China's Zhejiang University found driverless cars could be fooled into seeing red traffic lights as green.

The scientists directed a laser at the sensors of five camera models used by self-driving vehicles, with two open-source software packages reading the captured images.

Lasers of a 650-nanometer and a 520-nanometer wavelength rendered the entire image red or green, respectively, while flickering the laser at high frequencies only induced this coloration in certain image segments.

Adding a horizontal bar of green or red caused both software packages to incorrectly sense the traffic lights as green 30% of the time and red 86% of the time, on average, across the cameras.

From New Scientist
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