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Follow up question I googled. What is the resolution of our Eyes? Ans: 576 Megapixels [1]..... Holy..... And here we are, trying to rely on couple of cameras

Follow up question I googled. What is the resolution of our Eyes? Ans: 576 Megapixels [1]..... Holy..... And here we are, trying to rely on couple of cameras for autopilot. [1]http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html

alevskaya 7y ago
Yes but keep in mind that this data is immediately and heavily compressed and encoded - the data sent into the brain from the retinal ganglion cells has been estimated to be on the order of 10s Mbit/sec from careful studies on rodent RGN statistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.056 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.056
- cmenge 7y ago
  Not an expert, but this is also my understanding: The nerves are more like a neural network, not just wiring to the brain: https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-ancient-secrets-of-computer-vision-2-by-joseph-redmon-condensed-934e16eacb44 https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-ancient-secrets-of-computer-v...
googlemike 7y ago
Resolution has very little to do with object detection and obstacle avoidance. (not saying Musk isn't full of shit)
HillRat 7y ago
It’s not just resolution; the dynamic range (the “f-stops”) of the human visual system is incredibly wider than even high-quality film and digital cameras, meaning that cameras are much less capable at handling details between wide ranges of light and dark.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  Though post-processing from neural nets seems to close this gap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZFQ3f26pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZFQ3f26pA
adtac 7y ago
The resolution of the camera has nothing to do with our ability to understand the road. I can drive reasonably well with just a camera feed of the road, but the computer can't. So the bottleneck is in the image processing capability of the machine, not the quality of the camera.
- ksaj 7y ago
  Correct. You could follow a 1970's Atari green/black pixelated set of lines just as well. And optical illusions such as the Kanizsa Triangle demonstrate even that much info is more than ample, since your brain only needs the tiniest of hints to calculate shape and size in order to calculate direction. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/kanizsa-triangle https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/kanizsa-triangle
  - FroshKiller 7y ago
    Your comparison to a simple driving game might be misleading. A two-color game is probably an easier challenge, not a harder one, because the game developer has reduced your input to almost pure information rather than throwing a lot of visual data at you to interpret. In other words, it isn't that your eyes and brain are so good that you can still drive at an Atari level--it's that the Atari level is optimized for your eyes and brain.
    - ksaj 7y ago
      I agree to an extent, but it is a complex comparison to make, so it can easily look that way. Our brain creates a model of the surroundings based solely on memorized bits of the environment (allowing us to blink without the world going dark, and to track things in our peripheral views) plus prediction, which is something Atari exploits so we can convince ourselves the bars and dot have motion. We even temporarily convince ourselves that the blooping is the sound of impact. A long way to say that our sensors don't send complete objects like an OOP function would. Instead, they transmit just enough info (hints, maybe) to refresh the mental model. Similar to how we can see 4 dots and mentally translate it into a square laying in some particular direction in 3D space, even without lines or actually being 3D. The "bit" analogy breaks down when you consider this aspect. The data our brain works with isn't the same as the data a computer works with.
ekianjo 7y ago
> Ans: 576 Megapixels [1]..... Holy..... And here we are, trying to rely on couple of cameras for autopilot. We only have high resolution at the point of gaze point. Everything else is blur, so it's not all comparable with a camera.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Worse: we think we have high resolution outside of that point, but it's actually our brain making up the details it thinks are there. We don't even really have colour outside a narrow field, and all of that is obfuscated by blood vessels dropped in front of core parts of our visual field.
dahart 7y ago
> Ans: 576 Megapixels I’m skeptical. Since the human eye has less than 150M sensor cells, and our sensors aren’t as good as 8 or 10 bit resolution pixels, that answer is overestimating by at least 4x, and possibly a lot more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell
- Veedrac 7y ago
  He misconveyed the source. The claim was about the detail the eye can percieve in a given field of view, over time and by moving the eyes over it, not the amount of information the eye captures at any one time, which is vastly lower. It's mostly irrelevant for cars TBH, since crashes are quick events.
  - edejong 7y ago
    That’s a simplification. The events leading up to a crash are important. The spatial understanding of the situation on the road, the behavior of other drivers and other factors all play a role in the seconds before a crash.
    - Veedrac 7y ago
      Yes, but there's a time-accuracy trade off when you see things by scanning around. A good, wide camera trades off remembered perepheral details for lower-resolution but temporally up-to-date details, which matters more in a crash I'd expect.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  I can tell the difference between two 24-bit colors that are 1 value off in 1 channel, and that's not counting that digital displays can't fully exploit the darkest or brightest ranges of our eyes' sensitivity. Have you ever seen an HDR display showing well-made HDR content? Spatial resolution is not so easy, since we have much higher resolution at the center of our FOV.
  - 7y ago

alevskaya 7y ago

Yes but keep in mind that this data is immediately and heavily compressed and encoded - the data sent into the brain from the retinal ganglion cells has been estimated to be on the order of 10s Mbit/sec from careful studies on rodent RGN statistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.056 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.056

cmenge 7y ago
Not an expert, but this is also my understanding: The nerves are more like a neural network, not just wiring to the brain: https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-ancient-secrets-of-computer-vision-2-by-joseph-redmon-condensed-934e16eacb44 https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/the-ancient-secrets-of-computer-v...

googlemike 7y ago

Resolution has very little to do with object detection and obstacle avoidance. (not saying Musk isn't full of shit)

HillRat 7y ago

It’s not just resolution; the dynamic range (the “f-stops”) of the human visual system is incredibly wider than even high-quality film and digital cameras, meaning that cameras are much less capable at handling details between wide ranges of light and dark.

Veedrac 7y ago
Though post-processing from neural nets seems to close this gap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZFQ3f26pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZFQ3f26pA

adtac 7y ago

The resolution of the camera has nothing to do with our ability to understand the road. I can drive reasonably well with just a camera feed of the road, but the computer can't. So the bottleneck is in the image processing capability of the machine, not the quality of the camera.

ksaj 7y ago
Correct. You could follow a 1970's Atari green/black pixelated set of lines just as well. And optical illusions such as the Kanizsa Triangle demonstrate even that much info is more than ample, since your brain only needs the tiniest of hints to calculate shape and size in order to calculate direction. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/kanizsa-triangle https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/kanizsa-triangle
- FroshKiller 7y ago
  Your comparison to a simple driving game might be misleading. A two-color game is probably an easier challenge, not a harder one, because the game developer has reduced your input to almost pure information rather than throwing a lot of visual data at you to interpret. In other words, it isn't that your eyes and brain are so good that you can still drive at an Atari level--it's that the Atari level is optimized for your eyes and brain.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    I agree to an extent, but it is a complex comparison to make, so it can easily look that way. Our brain creates a model of the surroundings based solely on memorized bits of the environment (allowing us to blink without the world going dark, and to track things in our peripheral views) plus prediction, which is something Atari exploits so we can convince ourselves the bars and dot have motion. We even temporarily convince ourselves that the blooping is the sound of impact. A long way to say that our sensors don't send complete objects like an OOP function would. Instead, they transmit just enough info (hints, maybe) to refresh the mental model. Similar to how we can see 4 dots and mentally translate it into a square laying in some particular direction in 3D space, even without lines or actually being 3D. The "bit" analogy breaks down when you consider this aspect. The data our brain works with isn't the same as the data a computer works with.

ekianjo 7y ago

> Ans: 576 Megapixels [1]..... Holy..... And here we are, trying to rely on couple of cameras for autopilot. We only have high resolution at the point of gaze point. Everything else is blur, so it's not all comparable with a camera.

XorNot 7y ago
Worse: we think we have high resolution outside of that point, but it's actually our brain making up the details it thinks are there. We don't even really have colour outside a narrow field, and all of that is obfuscated by blood vessels dropped in front of core parts of our visual field.

dahart 7y ago

> Ans: 576 Megapixels I’m skeptical. Since the human eye has less than 150M sensor cells, and our sensors aren’t as good as 8 or 10 bit resolution pixels, that answer is overestimating by at least 4x, and possibly a lot more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell

Veedrac 7y ago
He misconveyed the source. The claim was about the detail the eye can percieve in a given field of view, over time and by moving the eyes over it, not the amount of information the eye captures at any one time, which is vastly lower. It's mostly irrelevant for cars TBH, since crashes are quick events.
- edejong 7y ago
  That’s a simplification. The events leading up to a crash are important. The spatial understanding of the situation on the road, the behavior of other drivers and other factors all play a role in the seconds before a crash.
  - Veedrac 7y ago
    Yes, but there's a time-accuracy trade off when you see things by scanning around. A good, wide camera trades off remembered perepheral details for lower-resolution but temporally up-to-date details, which matters more in a crash I'd expect.
hnuser123456 7y ago
I can tell the difference between two 24-bit colors that are 1 value off in 1 channel, and that's not counting that digital displays can't fully exploit the darkest or brightest ranges of our eyes' sensitivity. Have you ever seen an HDR display showing well-made HDR content? Spatial resolution is not so easy, since we have much higher resolution at the center of our FOV.
- 7y ago