
Tesla Achieved the Accuracy of Lidar with Its Advanced Computer Vision Tech - jv22222
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/04/24/tesla-achieved-the-accuracy-of-lidar-with-its-advanced-computer-vision-tech/
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xiaolingxiao
Claims like these are made Every 6 months. From personal experience I can say
it’s very easy to Overfit a huge CNN on a data set, and then observe it
performs well on the test set drawn from the same distribution. This is
Despite attempts to make the test set differ from training. Typically these
models fail outright in the wild.

I have also spoken to autopilot engineers at TESLA Who confirm this suspicion.
And this is a highly select team that work with Elon musk on a weekly basis.

The fact of the matter is robust depth estimation is not possible with just
cameras. Especially ones mounted inside the windshield. Remember when it rains
the distribution shifts completely. Tesla solves this issue by training two
nets, so now you’re just overfitting to two distributions.

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brandonkirc
> robust depth estimation is not possible with just cameras

I can believe this statement, and am definitely off put by the false promises
and failed timelines of autonomy released by Tesla over the past 5 years, but
the more important question would be “is the necessary amount of depth
estimation to achieve autonomous vehicles possible with just cameras?”, and
intuitively the answer is yes, seeing as that is how humans achieve an
acceptable level of depth perception for the same task.

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PhantomGremlin
Our eyes are less than 3" apart and we achieve "acceptable" depth perception
(at least at close range).

What if we had two cameras 12" apart? What about 60" apart (opposite corners
of windshield)? How much easier would that make the depth perception problem?

From a quick viewing of Tesla's autopilot info it doesn't seem like they are
doing stereoscopic vision with their cameras. Why not? Too hard to do?

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xiaolingxiao
The distance between camera is really important. In the lab everything is fine
tuned before each deployment. In the wild anything could happen, and if the
distance changes (that’s the base of the triangle ), all your calculations are
off.

That’s why monocular depth estimation is more robust. Skydio drones do it as
well.

