3 Manual Traffic Direction Recognition
“Traffic direction gesture recognition” has little to do with which way traffic is headed. Instead, the patent details a way for a self-driving car to detect and follow the gesture of a person giving traffic orders on a road (such as a police officer manually directing traffic).
This, of course, would be incredibly useful in the event of a street light or traffic signal failure. But the patent brings up other applications, too. For example, the system could detect a pedestrian in the road attempting to stop traffic in case of an accident or severely congested roads. It could then transmit that person’s gesture commands to other nearby self-driving cars, allowing them to react accordingly.