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>"People drive vision only." Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Do you mean that Tesla will only be using Computer Vision for autonomy? Doesn't or wouldn

>"People drive vision only." Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Do you mean that Tesla will only be using Computer Vision for autonomy? Doesn't or wouldn't Lidar compliment CV? Or is there a practical design consideration that makes them mutual exclusive?

emef 8y ago
Tesla has take a firm stance against using LiDAR and is doubling down on CV. I'm not sure if they have radars for parking assistance, but they are using cameras as primary sensor for perception and localization.
threeseed 8y ago
That people drive vision is so idiotic. Humans have far higher resolution sensors and the most advanced computer ever seen behind them. And even that fails at a far higher rate than we want self driving cars to be.
- XorNot 8y ago
  Conversely computers don't get tired, or "distracted", or drunk. They're also faster - human cognition is running about 150-200ms behind what you actually see. Some reflexes are running faster then that, but overall the human platform is not being used with that super-computer in full-control while driving at high speed - our hardware isn't capable of it. The thing we most bring to driving is navigating complex, low speed environment changes - but we're not great at that either (see the number of toddlers run over in their drive ways, for example).
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  The resolution outside of the fovea is pretty poor. It's a little unclear what portion of accidents we could cut out if we had human level performance, but never let the attention waver or disallowed reckless driving. Judging from NMVCCS it'd cut out somewhere between 34 - 75% of accidents. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811059 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
  - lutorm 8y ago
    That's not really relevant though because people don't stare at a fixed point, they trade time for resolution over a larger area.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"And even that fails at a far higher rate than we want self driving cars to be." Thanks, but did you mean to say that people fail at a far lower rate that we want self driving cars to have? Maybe I misunderstood your point?
  - gjm11 8y ago
    I'm not threeseed, but I'm pretty sure they meant what they said. Expanded version of the argument: "Karpathy says 'people drive vision-only' and apparently intends that to convince us that vision-only is good enough. But (1) those people driving vision-only are using human brains, whose abilities we have not yet come close to duplicating, and (2) even with the astonishing abilities of the human brain, those people driving vision-only make a lot of mistakes and have a lot of accidents, and we want self-driving cars to be much safer than that. So the fact that people drive vision-only is no reason to think that self-driving cars should do likewise. They're trying to be safer than people, with less computing power; why shouldn't we make up for that by giving them extra sensors?"
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      Thanks for expanding and clarifying the argument, this makes sense. Cheers.
- ajross 8y ago
  > Humans have far higher resolution sensors This is really not true. The phone in your pocket is just plain better. More total pixels per unit area, much greater dynamic range, able to sample over time periods an order of magnitude faster. The reason your vision seems better is because your brain is amazingly good at synthesizing a picture of the world around you. But all that data (the sphere around you is something like 150 MP at eye resolution) is an illusion. You're only looking at a million pixel(-equivalents) at once, thereabouts. [1] Your eyes come close only in the middle half a degree of your fovea. Everywhere else your brain gets a blurry mess and has to extrapolate.
  - naikrovek 8y ago
    I agree that, ultimately, vision and some IMUs will be all that's needed for an as-perfect-as-possible self-driving cars. Your statement on phone cameras being better than the human eye isn't true today, though. The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. This matters a great deal on sunny, cloudless days in a city with tall buildings casting dark shadows, for example. Just like how the biological system of "stupid sensor, smart thinking" helps biological organisms, that's what is going to need to be done for computer vision as well. About 1/3 of the human brain is dedicated to vision processing in some way. Think about that a second. One THIRD of the best, most powerful organic computer known is required for us to see what we see and we are still fooled by the things human eyes can be tricked by. It's going to take a lot of neural network training to duplicate that. Fortunately, the vision skills required to drive are a subset of overall vision capabilities.
    - ajross 8y ago
      > The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. Not at all true. All you need to do is take your camera into a dark room for proof. It can take useful pictures in environments you can't see. And with some manual control and safety precautions (seriously, don't actually do this) you'll note you can shoot useful photos of things that are very near bright sources like the sun where your eyes would be completely useless (and irrevocably damaged, again do not try this). What you're complaining about isn't dynamic range, it's exposure control. A human brain, again, makes much better decisions about what parts of the environment are "important" when setting the aperture (iris). So the stuff you want to see is visible, where the camera is mostly just going to guess that the center of the frame is what you want and will routinely leave stuff over or underexposed. Your last paragraph has the correct analysis but the wrong conclusion. It's the vision processing that makes the difference. The optical systems of a semiconductor camera absolutely are better, so a control system based on optics can absolutely be better.
leesec 8y ago
How many technologies do you see people working on where they say, "well we have one approach we think is gonna work, but we're also going to spend a ton of resources and time developing this other solution that would be useless if the first approach does work. Oh and it would make our cars 5k more expensive atleast."

emef 8y ago

Tesla has take a firm stance against using LiDAR and is doubling down on CV. I'm not sure if they have radars for parking assistance, but they are using cameras as primary sensor for perception and localization.

threeseed 8y ago

That people drive vision is so idiotic. Humans have far higher resolution sensors and the most advanced computer ever seen behind them. And even that fails at a far higher rate than we want self driving cars to be.

XorNot 8y ago
Conversely computers don't get tired, or "distracted", or drunk. They're also faster - human cognition is running about 150-200ms behind what you actually see. Some reflexes are running faster then that, but overall the human platform is not being used with that super-computer in full-control while driving at high speed - our hardware isn't capable of it. The thing we most bring to driving is navigating complex, low speed environment changes - but we're not great at that either (see the number of toddlers run over in their drive ways, for example).
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
The resolution outside of the fovea is pretty poor. It's a little unclear what portion of accidents we could cut out if we had human level performance, but never let the attention waver or disallowed reckless driving. Judging from NMVCCS it'd cut out somewhere between 34 - 75% of accidents. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811059 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
- lutorm 8y ago
  That's not really relevant though because people don't stare at a fixed point, they trade time for resolution over a larger area.
bogomipz 8y ago
>"And even that fails at a far higher rate than we want self driving cars to be." Thanks, but did you mean to say that people fail at a far lower rate that we want self driving cars to have? Maybe I misunderstood your point?
- gjm11 8y ago
  I'm not threeseed, but I'm pretty sure they meant what they said. Expanded version of the argument: "Karpathy says 'people drive vision-only' and apparently intends that to convince us that vision-only is good enough. But (1) those people driving vision-only are using human brains, whose abilities we have not yet come close to duplicating, and (2) even with the astonishing abilities of the human brain, those people driving vision-only make a lot of mistakes and have a lot of accidents, and we want self-driving cars to be much safer than that. So the fact that people drive vision-only is no reason to think that self-driving cars should do likewise. They're trying to be safer than people, with less computing power; why shouldn't we make up for that by giving them extra sensors?"
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    Thanks for expanding and clarifying the argument, this makes sense. Cheers.
ajross 8y ago
> Humans have far higher resolution sensors This is really not true. The phone in your pocket is just plain better. More total pixels per unit area, much greater dynamic range, able to sample over time periods an order of magnitude faster. The reason your vision seems better is because your brain is amazingly good at synthesizing a picture of the world around you. But all that data (the sphere around you is something like 150 MP at eye resolution) is an illusion. You're only looking at a million pixel(-equivalents) at once, thereabouts. [1] Your eyes come close only in the middle half a degree of your fovea. Everywhere else your brain gets a blurry mess and has to extrapolate.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  I agree that, ultimately, vision and some IMUs will be all that's needed for an as-perfect-as-possible self-driving cars. Your statement on phone cameras being better than the human eye isn't true today, though. The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. This matters a great deal on sunny, cloudless days in a city with tall buildings casting dark shadows, for example. Just like how the biological system of "stupid sensor, smart thinking" helps biological organisms, that's what is going to need to be done for computer vision as well. About 1/3 of the human brain is dedicated to vision processing in some way. Think about that a second. One THIRD of the best, most powerful organic computer known is required for us to see what we see and we are still fooled by the things human eyes can be tricked by. It's going to take a lot of neural network training to duplicate that. Fortunately, the vision skills required to drive are a subset of overall vision capabilities.
  - ajross 8y ago
    > The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. Not at all true. All you need to do is take your camera into a dark room for proof. It can take useful pictures in environments you can't see. And with some manual control and safety precautions (seriously, don't actually do this) you'll note you can shoot useful photos of things that are very near bright sources like the sun where your eyes would be completely useless (and irrevocably damaged, again do not try this). What you're complaining about isn't dynamic range, it's exposure control. A human brain, again, makes much better decisions about what parts of the environment are "important" when setting the aperture (iris). So the stuff you want to see is visible, where the camera is mostly just going to guess that the center of the frame is what you want and will routinely leave stuff over or underexposed. Your last paragraph has the correct analysis but the wrong conclusion. It's the vision processing that makes the difference. The optical systems of a semiconductor camera absolutely are better, so a control system based on optics can absolutely be better.

leesec 8y ago

How many technologies do you see people working on where they say, "well we have one approach we think is gonna work, but we're also going to spend a ton of resources and time developing this other solution that would be useless if the first approach does work. Oh and it would make our cars 5k more expensive atleast."