Apple quietly wheels out 'Voxelnet' driverless car tech paper Apple researchers have released a paper about a "trainable deep architecture", setting out the fruity firm's plans to make autonomous vehicles better at detecting cyclists and pedestrians. The paper, jointly authored by Apple researchers Yin Zhou and Oncel Tuzel, details a system the pair call Voxelnet. A voxel is a point on a …
don't you mean PSA of France?
Voxelnet is hardly a trademark violation wrt Vauxhall. For one, Voxelnet is a network of points in a 3D space and not the name of a range of cars.
If Apple were ever (unlikely) to release a car it would be called either "iCar" or "Apple Car(t)" or something equally stupid and moronic.
I think they'll ditch the reference to car or auto, because 1) it doesn't create a worldwide brand and 2) they'll want to redefine a concept.
It'll be short, snappy and descriptive of the look. Like a Pod maybe, but they've already used that one... it'll be the iCraft or the Vessel or something. The Voyager. Yes, that's the one... the Apple Voyager.
Dave 126 ... it looks to me, judging by the paper they published, that they are rather set on the name. And what tired old jokes are those? Near as I can tell, thems the facts, and hardly funny.
I wasn't discussing the technology, I was discussing what I would do if I were a land-shark in charge of protecting the intellectual property of a major company. In my mind, Apple is running the risk of trademark infringement using that near-homophone in the context of automobiles. I'm sorry if that upsets your "apple can do no wrong" mindset.
Funny how folks without a logical leg to stand on often resort to ad hominem ...
Pilgrimage? Crusade? Peregrination? Ah! The Peregrine. That's one model name taken care of. Yes... that's a marketing wet dream isn't it?
Here at Apple, we looked around and thought, "You know, there's lots of technology companies making self-driving cars, and electric vehicles", but at the end of the day they're all still little tin boxes who's purpose is getting you from A to B. We weren't interested in that, we'll leave that to the others. We thought, "You know, wouldn't it be great if we could take the functionality of a car and get rid off all the hassle of ownership - all the maintenance and insurance..." that'd be great, wouldn't it? But for us at Apple, that's not enough. The car is like a little home away from home for the duration of your journey, right? So, what if we were to add to that journey all of the really great things that people enjoy when they're at home. And what if we took all of the things they enjoy when they're moving around too? Woah, that'd be really hard, right? I mean how would you make that work, eh? You want to combine people's cars with their houses and their phones? Come on... you can't make that work, can you? Well, let me introduce to you a new concept in land based vehicular transportation... the iVoyage Odyssey.
*mirrors and smoke effect*
*Applause*
And for the more budget conscious individual...
*mirrors and smoke*
The iVoyage Peregrine.
You're probably looking at these babies and thinking, "How do I get to own one of these?"
Well, let me answer that by telling you now... you don't.
Introducing... iVoyage Freedom. A subscription pass that gives you affordable access to a fleet of iVoyagers tailored to meet your own requirements at the moment that you need them. They will come to you, wherever you need, whenever you need. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
"LIDAR-based 3D detection methods by a large margin"
Is not a particularly scientific statement, and might lead a reader to believe some fudging is going on. The authors, however, go on to say "VoxelNet significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method MV (BV+FV+RGB) [5] based on LiDAR+RGB, by 10.68%, 2.78% and 6.29% in easy, moderate, and hard levels respectively" which is much more honest statement.
You can see why Apple are reluctant to talk to El Reg, maybe they don't like their quotes being misrepresented.
"A voxel is a point on a 3D grid."
It's actually a small volume, not an actual point, just as a pixel is an area on your screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
Hence the description: "a group of points within each voxel" (my emphasis).
OTOH what's a "trainable deep architecture"? It sounds like a ventilation shaft above a railway tunnel.
"OTOH what's a "trainable deep architecture"? It sounds like a ventilation shaft above a railway tunnel."
I think it means they used three stacked multi-layer perceptrons [I didn't really try to understand that bit of the paper], but these days everything has to be called "deep machine learning" and neural net sounds so last-century.
LIDAR has a few problems.
1) It's not that reliable
2) Interference / performance if every car is using it
3) Vulnerable to DOS, spoofing and other attacks.
"but these days everything has to be called "deep machine learning" and neural net sounds so last-century."
Yes. True. I'm very sceptical, fuelled by my own 35+ years programming experience and so called AI research.
"Apple is notorious for keeping its technology advances largely under wraps"
Please don't use silly adjectives to cast aspersion.
Apple is secretive because others are notorious for ripping off their ideas and work. Look at what happened when Gates rushed Windows to market after stealing Macintosh code. Apple decided - not again.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
