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The problem is that they don’t have lidar and therefore can’t reliably measure depth, right? A billboard far away high up in the air may appear in the same dire

The problem is that they don’t have lidar and therefore can’t reliably measure depth, right? A billboard far away high up in the air may appear in the same direction as a closer road sign if you don’t have depth perception. You should be able to infer it from a camera with the right model but those methods are more fallible. Similar root cause to that time the guy got beheaded by a white truck perpendicular to the highway that looked like the sky.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago
I believe they are making depth perception using computer vision. The idea is that if you can take an image and predict the distances to the objects in it, you can then create an image that is a transpose of the original based on your predictions, but at a different distance. In case of Tesla moving forward, that would be a split second later, closer to the original image. As the car moves forward, you actually take that second image and compare the virtual to the original. At this point you probably get it wrong, but you adjust your predictions and recalculate until your virtual transposed image looks exactly like the real image, at which point you've got the distances pretty darn close. I remember watching a talk about their computer vision, and it was pretty impressive. The challenge is that despite knowing where the billboards are, they still look that way because sometimes, in obscure situations, in little old towns with fuzzy rules, road signs actually do appear in weird places, and that's where the car often trips up because without sufficient data it just can't build a prediction model to know when to respond, and when to suppress the new input.
- kavalg 6y ago
  It is called depth from motion. I think this is what the Google guys used to create the 3D buildings view back then.
  - viggity 6y ago
    and depth from motion is really just stereoscopy using multiple photos from the same camera instead of two photos from two different cameras. I have a side project where I manage to get a helluva lot of depth info using a single photo from a single camera (monocular photogrammetry).
Acinyx 6y ago
They put this "billboard" right at the height and location of a normal stop sign, location is not going to help for this.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

I believe they are making depth perception using computer vision. The idea is that if you can take an image and predict the distances to the objects in it, you can then create an image that is a transpose of the original based on your predictions, but at a different distance. In case of Tesla moving forward, that would be a split second later, closer to the original image. As the car moves forward, you actually take that second image and compare the virtual to the original. At this point you probably get it wrong, but you adjust your predictions and recalculate until your virtual transposed image looks exactly like the real image, at which point you've got the distances pretty darn close. I remember watching a talk about their computer vision, and it was pretty impressive. The challenge is that despite knowing where the billboards are, they still look that way because sometimes, in obscure situations, in little old towns with fuzzy rules, road signs actually do appear in weird places, and that's where the car often trips up because without sufficient data it just can't build a prediction model to know when to respond, and when to suppress the new input.

kavalg 6y ago
It is called depth from motion. I think this is what the Google guys used to create the 3D buildings view back then.
- viggity 6y ago
  and depth from motion is really just stereoscopy using multiple photos from the same camera instead of two photos from two different cameras. I have a side project where I manage to get a helluva lot of depth info using a single photo from a single camera (monocular photogrammetry).

Acinyx 6y ago

They put this "billboard" right at the height and location of a normal stop sign, location is not going to help for this.