[magicalist]

> they knew where the traffic light should be, then did the basic geometry to figure out where that is in their image, and then determined the color of the pixels to figure out what the light was saying.

This has to be really old information, though. They have that video of the car detecting school bus stop signs and a police officer directing traffic. A stop light is child's play after that.

[jayjay71]

Why do you assume those other things are harder to detect? Computer vision is tough, and human detection is one of the most researched problems in the field. Uber's self-driving cars were running red lights not too long ago. And it's important to understand that a video is not a live demo.

If Google has an approach that works for them and it depends on the maps - that's fine. I'm just pointing out that they (probably) made a decision a long time ago that they are going to use those maps to further their self-driving technology. It's a design choice, with pros and cons, like any other decision.