Sometimes technology can make mistakes. A Dutch man was fined $400 after an AI-powered camera thought it had caught him talking on his phone while driving when in reality, he was simply scratching his head and the system made a mistake.
Back in November 2023, Tim Hansen received a fine for allegedly speaking on his mobile phone while driving. He was shocked over the incident since he couldn’t remember a time when he used his phone while driving on that day. This opted him to check the photo that was taken of the moment on the the Central Judicial Collection Agency.
Looking at the photo for the first time, it does seem like Hansen is speaking on the phone but at a closer look, you can tell that he isn’t actually holding anything in his hand. In reality, he was simply scratching the side of his head and the camera mistook the position of his hand for it holding a phone.
Hansen, who works in IT, began creating algorithms that edit and analyze images and used his own experience to explain how the police camera system, Monocam, works, and why it can also make mistakes.
“If a model has to predict whether something is ‘yes’ or ‘not’ the case, it can of course also happen that the model is wrong,” Hansen said. “In the case of my ticket, the model indicated that I am holding a telephone, while that is not the case. Then we speak of a false positive. A perfect model only predicts true positives and true negatives, but 100% correct prediction is rare.”
He went on to explain that these systems have to be trained on a large set of images divided into two or three groups: a training set, a validation set and a test set.
“The algorithm we used, and that of the police, may suspect that a telephone is present because the training dataset contains many examples of people calling with a telephone in their hand next to their ear,” Hansen said.”It may well be that the training dataset contains few or no photos of people sitting with an empty hand on their ear. In that case, it becomes less important for the algorithm whether a phone is actually held in the hand, but it is sufficient if the hand is close to the ear. To improve this, more photos should be added where the hand is empty.”
While it’s great to rely on technology to make a tough decision, a human filter should also be used to minimize the number of false positives. Only in his case, the fine was confirmed by a human after analyzing the photo captured by the camera.
The Dutch driver has since contested the fine but must now wait up to 26 weeks for an official verdict.