Computer Vision

Waymo has released updated safety data illustrating that its autonomous 'Waymo Driver' significantly outperforms human drivers in areas where it operates. Based on over 170 million rider-only miles, data show major reductions in crash rates involving injuries, serious injuries, and airbag deployments, demonstrating superior performance in avoiding collisions with pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles.

Google introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, an upgraded model for embodied reasoning that enhances how robots perceive and navigate the physical world. Featuring improved spatial understanding, multi-view processing, and specialized capabilities like instrument reading and success detection, the model enables greater autonomy. It is now available via the Gemini API and Google AI Studio for developer use.

VOID is a video inpainting model built on CogVideoX that removes objects and their physical interactions from videos, such as falling items or secondary effects. It uses a two-pass architecture with interaction-aware mask conditioning to maintain temporal consistency, leveraging VLM reasoning and SAM2 to generate precise masks for comprehensive scene editing.

The door detection API identifies architectural floor-plan doors from PDFs. Free-tier jobs typically take 2-4 minutes, with speed scaling based on complexity. Pro and Enterprise users benefit from GPU-accelerated processing. The asynchronous workflow uses polling to retrieve results, and credits are billed per page.