[HN Gopher] Vehicle camera system that can detect a single brick...
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Vehicle camera system that can detect a single brick at 150 meters
Author : dceddia
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-02-01 20:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _Given engineering, space, and styling limitations, this
| typically results in a small unit placed forward of the rear-view
| mirror with cameras spaced only about 20cm apart_
|
| It's startling how hard it is to get a vehicle project to change
| anything. A non-structural but rigid pressed-steel truss that
| goes somewhere behind the grille of the vehicle would make this
| software compromise unnecessary.
|
| I'm aware that Tesla basically took Mobileye's single-camera
| product off the shelf, but I wish someone in the Model S
| development team could have added that dual-camera structure as a
| requirement on Day 1.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| One advantage of keeping it behind the windshield (aside from
| having a higher point of view), is that they get automatic
| camera cleaning from the windshield wipers (plus defrosting).
| If they put it lower behind the grill, then they need a
| completely separate cleaning/defrosting system.
|
| My car's lower bumper mounted radar antenna stops working any
| time I drive in the snow because it quickly gets coated with a
| layer of snow.
| yarcob wrote:
| You also get a better view of the road the higher up you
| mount the camera.
| mike_d wrote:
| Can we please ban paid self-written fluff pieces from Forbes.com?
| (forbes.com/sites/*)
|
| Flagging this.
| jshevek wrote:
| > "If you flag..."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| HN headlines like this don't make me go, "Wow!" They make me
| think, "So you're saying there's a larger chance that the
| software is going to mistake that brick for something else
| because it has that much more granular detail."
| porphyra wrote:
| light.co is also doing vehicular stereo vision: https://light.co/
|
| The downsides of stereo are:
|
| * range uncertainty grows quadratically with range
|
| * range uncertainty is unbounded in the case of featureless
| surfaces or bad illumination
|
| * range from stereo disparity depends on looking at very small
| differences between two images and may be much more adversely
| affected by weather (rain drops on the lens) compared to, say,
| lidar.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| This is an advertisement piece written by a NODAR advisor about
| how cool their "Hammerhead" system is.
|
| TLDR: It's stereo cameras with wide baseline and software
| compensation for vibrations/camera shake.
|
| That said, I am pretty disappointed that there's no mention of
| the actual problems that people working with stereo cameras in
| cars have, which is that optical matching usually doesn't have a
| unique solution and that reflections ruin everything. The latter
| especially gets worse the wider you make the stereo baseline, so
| I'd bet you that NODAR will fail badly when there's ice on the
| road.
|
| That combination of false correspondences due to reflections and
| AI in-painting to produce the illusion of a complete dataset when
| it is impossible to see depth everywhere, might be quite
| dangerous. We laugh at Skydio drones for crashing into windows,
| puddles, and lakes because their AI (with 6 cameras) gets
| confused by reflecting things. I'd find it a lot less funny if
| that was my car crashing.
| cycomanic wrote:
| From discussions with engineers that work at car manufacturers
| on technology for self-driving cars, the biggy is really the
| weather. All these technologies work fine in sunny weather, but
| it's really adverse weather conditions where things go south.
|
| One of the friends told me that is belief is that proper self-
| driving is still a long time away, because of this.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> We humans have good depth perception out to about ten meters
| due to the roughly six centimeter separation of our eyes.
|
| Depth perception is more complex than eye separation distance. By
| the above measurement, most ball sports would be nearly
| impossible. We all still play baseball. The reality is that we
| use multiple techniques for judging distance. Our heads move,
| increasing the separation between observations (see any owl
| scoping out prey before launching). Lens focus ads another flow
| of information. And we judge distance to distant objects using
| their apparent positions relative to others closer to us.
|
| Talk to anyone who has lost an eye. They are perfectly capable of
| driving cars and throwing balls accurately well beyond ten
| meters.
| riversflow wrote:
| >Talk to anyone who lost an eye.
|
| My mom has amblyopia and is old enough that it didn't get
| treated. She can drive just fine, but she can't grab the
| clothes line between her fingers. She has to sort of paw at it
| and catch it with her palm.
|
| And I'd say visual processing is a lot more complex then we
| give it credit for. We don't understand what's really all going
| on yet. We still are trying to understand microsaccades for
| example. Ocular processing is extremely fascinating.
| michaelmior wrote:
| I have mostly untreated amblyopia and while mine doesn't
| sound as bad as your mothers, I've always been terrible at
| most ball sports despite being reasonably athletic due to
| poor depth perception.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Not to mention object recognition. If I see something that
| resembles a car, I know roughly what size I expect a car to be
| so based on the size it appears, I can reasonably estimate its
| distance from me. Of course this breaks down when objects don't
| meet our expectation in terms of size and can be the source of
| some interesting optical illusions.
| treeman79 wrote:
| My eyes didn't work together until I got prism glasses. I was
| utterly shocked to experience depth perception. Didn't know it
| was missing.
| nickff wrote:
| I've read that nearly half of people have low/no depth
| perception, and use a variety of other cues to judge
| distance. Sorry, but I don't have the citation handy.
| treeman79 wrote:
| It really doesn't effect me.
|
| I can turn it off by using normal glasses.
|
| Minor movements reveal depth of most things.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| It sure is a puff piece. I was going to reject it out of hand. In
| fact I was in the middle of slating it when I actually looked up
| how hammerhead sharks see. I learnt that hammerhead sharks have
| really good binocular vision.
| (http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/837...)
|
| I am wary of the depth map they've provided. It looks
| suspiciously smooth and stable. Given that roads have little to
| no features of use, the belief propagation must be very good (or
| its been tarted up in post.)
|
| I assume they use feature matching to estimate the camera
| movement, and the those same features are compared from each
| camera to get the divergence. I would be interested to see the
| calibration setup, and how it performs at speed.
| random5634 wrote:
| Lidar is kind of magic. The cost of tech seems to reduce pretty
| substantially over time. When folks argue that lidar should not
| be used - other than cost I don't get it, it seems to give you
| some great added awareness of environment, especially looking at
| for example Waymo and some others really advancing things in this
| space. 5 years from now? Going to be pretty slick?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Ego.
|
| Lidars are expensive, fairly large, power hungry and depending
| on what your using them for, noisy.
|
| Musk doesn't like them because they are expensive. Not because
| they don't work. He's spent billions trying to polish the turd
| that is their monocular depth estimation + radar system. Sure
| its impressive, but its nowhere near good enough for safe
| autonomy. (I am sceptical that they ever will with that sensor
| layout. Thats neatly avoiding the issue that there is no
| redundancy)
|
| If you want ground truth data from a moving vehicle, then there
| is no real alternative to lidar[1]. Anyone who tells you
| otherwise is either:
|
| 1) an idiot
|
| 2) a musk fan
|
| 3) trying to sell you something.
|
| Now, sure for "autopilot" (cruise control) where there isn't
| that much to do, radar and basic object detection is good
| enough. But any sign of danger and it backs off, leaving you no
| time to unfuck the situation.
|
| [1] I work for a mapping company, There are other ways to get
| to <50cm accuracy point clouds, but its not fast and requires a
| boat load of GPU (in the order of thousands of hours per km
| driven)
| andbberger wrote:
| Wait are you serious Tesla isn't even doing stereo vision? I
| don't know why I charitably assumed that they were
| KaiserPro wrote:
| From what I can divine they have a front facing nearfield
| and a front facing farfield camera. The rest of the cameras
| are spread all over the car.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _When folks argue that lidar should not be used_
|
| This is a strawman. Nobody argues that it should not be used,
| only that driving is demonstrably possible without it.
| random5634 wrote:
| comma @comma_ai
|
| We are so committed to LIDAR being useless that we're dumping
| our LIDARs for cheap! Buy them and start your own Self
| Driving Car company!
|
| https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang.
| ..
|
| I can find plenty more.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I believe tesla argues this
| snet0 wrote:
| > "Lidar is a fool's errand," Elon Musk said. "Anyone relying
| on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that
| are unnecessary. It's like having a whole bunch of expensive
| appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a
| whole bunch of them, it's ridiculous, you'll see."
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Like, one appendix is bad
|
| Except that the appendix is a useful organ. Had it been
| truly useless it would have evolved away long ago, yet we
| find dinosaurs had them too. I think Musk is also wrong
| about lidar. It probably does have a place in this problem
| even if, like his blind spot re the appendix, Musk doesn't
| currently understand what that place may be.
|
| "Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No
| More"
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.
| h...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| At least one purpose of the appendix has been already
| been found, a long time ago. It serves as an
| isolated/safe repository for gut bacteria in case an
| adverse event wipes out the rest of the population.
| m463 wrote:
| I think this article touches on some of it:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...
|
| I think it might be like ray tracing. It's the holy grail of
| graphics, which makes engineers very positive about it. Yet it
| is slow and expensive and most problems do perfectly fine if
| not better with "conventional graphics".
| [deleted]
| kfarr wrote:
| Yes you could think of an analogous statement being: why do we
| need lenses? A raw exposed imager is just fine, we can use
| machine learning to extrapolate what the lens would be
| providing. And yes that's true but why in the hell would you
| want to spend time doing that? Self driving is hard enough
| already.
| random5634 wrote:
| Exactly - cheat freely to start - mapping, lidar, multicam
| etc. Eventually sure, two camera vision and audio only maybe?
| redisman wrote:
| Why would that be optimal? Sounds like you'd just be
| replicating humans - who are pretty lousy and non-optimal
| even in cars designed specifically for them!
| Ekaros wrote:
| Shouldn't it be able to do that much anyway? Considering
| potential conditions of highway speed and either heavy rain, snow
| or black ice... A brick is pretty big object and 150m can be
| quite close...
| kcolford wrote:
| Question for others on HN: What if you used many cameras in a
| row, each separated from its neighbour by a single stiff anchor
| like a chain of Mobileyes? Then perform calculations between each
| neighbouring camera and gradually build up the necessary
| correction between the two cameras at the outermost points.
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(page generated 2021-02-02 23:02 UTC)