Self-driving cars are playing Grand Theft Auto to become better drivers: Realistic scenes train cars to recognize objects on the road

Grand Theft Auto may not be the first place you'd go to learn better driving skills, but researchers are now using this fictional world to train self-driving cars. A team has discovered that machine learning can extract maneuver and landscape data much faster in these virtual settings than with traditional methods. Using computer vision algorithms, the team labeled thousands of images in just a few hours, which will be used to teach autonomous cars to recognize different objects. Cars use object identification data to'learn' how to recognize objects, such as pedestrians or cyclists. Gathering this information is usually conducted by researchers, who comb through scenes from real life footage and draw borders around objects by hand.