"Lidar is not seeing the world as a series of probabilistic phantasms that may or may not be a pedestrian, or a jersey barrier, or whatever" Lidar is inherentl

"Lidar is not seeing the world as a series of probabilistic phantasms that may or may not be a pedestrian, or a jersey barrier, or whatever" Lidar is inherently probabilistic too,like every sensor is. Just because the photomultiplier voltage rises and some peak detection hardware can correlate it with a transmit pulse, it does not mean that there is a "point" at that position in 3d space. It has different error characteristics to vision sure, but it is still an inference problem with corresponding artifacts to deal with. In fact I would say that the different error characteristics actually make them ideal for sensor fusion, i.e. Lidar for initial depth and vision for filling in the details.