Self-driving cars: problems with emergency vehicles' blue lights

Study "Epileptic seizures" with robo-cars

2024-12-16 From Holger Holzer/sp-x | Translated by AI 1 min Reading Time

The camera systems of self-driving cars are not yet fully developed. The blue lights of police or emergency services vehicles can seriously confuse them.

The cameras of autonomous cars do not like flickering police lights.(Image: Fabian Kirchbauer/SP-X) — The cameras of autonomous cars do not like flickering police lights.
(Image: Fabian Kirchbauer/SP-X)

Video games and movies often warn in the opening credits of the risk of epileptic seizures due to stroboscopic effects on the screen or TV. Apparently, flickering flashes of light are not only a problem for humans, but also for self-driving cars. As researchers at Israel's Negev University have now discovered, the blue lights of emergency vehicles can completely disorient them.

In their recently published study, the researchers also gave the phenomenon a fitting name: Epilepticar - a combination of "epilepsy" and "car". They investigated how five camera-based environment recognition systems for autonomous driving react to 14 different light patterns of emergency vehicles. The result: all of them were irritated to a greater or lesser extent by the beacons. According to the researchers, the flickering light, for example, distorts the colors and contours of vehicles to such an extent that the software can no longer correctly disentangle the camera image.

Dangerous phenomenon

The phenomenon is dangerous in the eyes of the researchers, as it can cause accidents in the vicinity of emergency vehicles. In addition, the effect could easily be used for criminal attacks. Improved AI image recognition software could provide a remedy. The researchers have developed a variant and given it a name: "Caracetamol", based on the well-known painkiller.

The study is also interesting because there have recently been more than a dozen accidents in the USA involving self-driving Tesla e-cars and emergency vehicles. A total of 15 people have been injured, one even fatally. Tesla also primarily uses cameras for environment recognition - however, the manufacturer's system was not tested as part of the study.

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Date: 08.12.2025

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