12 ms·

Vehicle camera system that can detect a single brick at 150 meters

46 points by dceddia 6y ago

porphyra 6y ago
light.co is also doing vehicular stereo vision: https://light.co/ https://light.co/ The downsides of stereo are: * range uncertainty grows quadratically with range * range uncertainty is unbounded in the case of featureless surfaces or bad illumination * range from stereo disparity depends on looking at very small differences between two images and may be much more adversely affected by weather (rain drops on the lens) compared to, say, lidar.
fxtentacle 6y ago
This is an advertisement piece written by a NODAR advisor about how cool their "Hammerhead" system is. TLDR: It's stereo cameras with wide baseline and software compensation for vibrations/camera shake. That said, I am pretty disappointed that there's no mention of the actual problems that people working with stereo cameras in cars have, which is that optical matching usually doesn't have a unique solution and that reflections ruin everything. The latter especially gets worse the wider you make the stereo baseline, so I'd bet you that NODAR will fail badly when there's ice on the road. That combination of false correspondences due to reflections and AI in-painting to produce the illusion of a complete dataset when it is impossible to see depth everywhere, might be quite dangerous. We laugh at Skydio drones for crashing into windows, puddles, and lakes because their AI (with 6 cameras) gets confused by reflecting things. I'd find it a lot less funny if that was my car crashing.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  From discussions with engineers that work at car manufacturers on technology for self-driving cars, the biggy is really the weather. All these technologies work fine in sunny weather, but it's really adverse weather conditions where things go south. One of the friends told me that is belief is that proper self-driving is still a long time away, because of this.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> We humans have good depth perception out to about ten meters due to the roughly six centimeter separation of our eyes. Depth perception is more complex than eye separation distance. By the above measurement, most ball sports would be nearly impossible. We all still play baseball. The reality is that we use multiple techniques for judging distance. Our heads move, increasing the separation between observations (see any owl scoping out prey before launching). Lens focus ads another flow of information. And we judge distance to distant objects using their apparent positions relative to others closer to us. Talk to anyone who has lost an eye. They are perfectly capable of driving cars and throwing balls accurately well beyond ten meters.
- treeman79 6y ago
  My eyes didn’t work together until I got prism glasses. I was utterly shocked to experience depth perception. Didn’t know it was missing.
  - nickff 6y ago
    I've read that nearly half of people have low/no depth perception, and use a variety of other cues to judge distance. Sorry, but I don't have the citation handy.
    - treeman79 6y ago
      It really doesn’t effect me. I can turn it off by using normal glasses. Minor movements reveal depth of most things.
- riversflow 6y ago
  >Talk to anyone who lost an eye. My mom has amblyopia and is old enough that it didn’t get treated. She can drive just fine, but she can’t grab the clothes line between her fingers. She has to sort of paw at it and catch it with her palm. And I’d say visual processing is a lot more complex then we give it credit for. We don’t understand what’s really all going on yet. We still are trying to understand microsaccades for example. Ocular processing is extremely fascinating.
random5634 6y ago
Lidar is kind of magic. The cost of tech seems to reduce pretty substantially over time. When folks argue that lidar should not be used - other than cost I don't get it, it seems to give you some great added awareness of environment, especially looking at for example Waymo and some others really advancing things in this space. 5 years from now? Going to be pretty slick?
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
  > When folks argue that lidar should not be used This is a strawman. Nobody argues that it should not be used, only that driving is demonstrably possible without it.
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    I believe tesla argues this
  - snet0 6y ago
    > “Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      >> Like, one appendix is bad Except that the appendix is a useful organ. Had it been truly useless it would have evolved away long ago, yet we find dinosaurs had them too. I think Musk is also wrong about lidar. It probably does have a place in this problem even if, like his blind spot re the appendix, Musk doesn't currently understand what that place may be. "Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No More" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.h...
      - forgotmypw17 6y ago
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
> Given engineering, space, and styling limitations, this typically results in a small unit placed forward of the rear-view mirror with cameras spaced only about 20cm apart It's startling how hard it is to get a vehicle project to change anything. A non-structural but rigid pressed-steel truss that goes somewhere behind the grille of the vehicle would make this software compromise unnecessary. I'm aware that Tesla basically took Mobileye's single-camera product off the shelf, but I wish someone in the Model S development team could have added that dual-camera structure as a requirement on Day 1.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  One advantage of keeping it behind the windshield (aside from having a higher point of view), is that they get automatic camera cleaning from the windshield wipers (plus defrosting). If they put it lower behind the grill, then they need a completely separate cleaning/defrosting system. My car's lower bumper mounted radar antenna stops working any time I drive in the snow because it quickly gets coated with a layer of snow.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    You also get a better view of the road the higher up you mount the camera.
mike_d 6y ago
Can we please ban paid self-written fluff pieces from Forbes.com? (forbes.com/sites/*) Flagging this.
- jshevek 6y ago
  > "If you flag..." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
HN headlines like this don't make me go, "Wow!" They make me think, "So you're saying there's a larger chance that the software is going to mistake that brick for something else because it has that much more granular detail."
KaiserPro 6y ago
It sure is a puff piece. I was going to reject it out of hand. In fact I was in the middle of slating it when I actually looked up how hammerhead sharks see. I learnt that hammerhead sharks have really good binocular vision. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/8376740.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/837...) I am wary of the depth map they've provided. It looks suspiciously smooth and stable. Given that roads have little to no features of use, the belief propagation must be very good (or its been tarted up in post.) I assume they use feature matching to estimate the camera movement, and the those same features are compared from each camera to get the divergence. I would be interested to see the calibration setup, and how it performs at speed.
kcolford 6y ago
Question for others on HN: What if you used many cameras in a row, each separated from its neighbour by a single stiff anchor like a chain of Mobileyes? Then perform calculations between each neighbouring camera and gradually build up the necessary correction between the two cameras at the outermost points.
Ekaros 6y ago
Shouldn't it be able to do that much anyway? Considering potential conditions of highway speed and either heavy rain, snow or black ice... A brick is pretty big object and 150m can be quite close...
Proven 6y ago
Great. Can they stop bothering us with captchas now?

46 points by dceddia 6y ago

light.co is also doing vehicular stereo vision: https://light.co/ https://light.co/ The downsides of stereo are: * range uncertainty grows quadratically with range * range uncertainty is unbounded in the case of featureless surfaces or bad illumination * range from stereo disparity depends on looking at very small differences between two images and may be much more adversely affected by weather (rain drops on the lens) compared to, say, lidar.

fxtentacle 6y ago

This is an advertisement piece written by a NODAR advisor about how cool their "Hammerhead" system is. TLDR: It's stereo cameras with wide baseline and software compensation for vibrations/camera shake. That said, I am pretty disappointed that there's no mention of the actual problems that people working with stereo cameras in cars have, which is that optical matching usually doesn't have a unique solution and that reflections ruin everything. The latter especially gets worse the wider you make the stereo baseline, so I'd bet you that NODAR will fail badly when there's ice on the road. That combination of false correspondences due to reflections and AI in-painting to produce the illusion of a complete dataset when it is impossible to see depth everywhere, might be quite dangerous. We laugh at Skydio drones for crashing into windows, puddles, and lakes because their AI (with 6 cameras) gets confused by reflecting things. I'd find it a lot less funny if that was my car crashing.

cycomanic 6y ago
From discussions with engineers that work at car manufacturers on technology for self-driving cars, the biggy is really the weather. All these technologies work fine in sunny weather, but it's really adverse weather conditions where things go south. One of the friends told me that is belief is that proper self-driving is still a long time away, because of this.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> We humans have good depth perception out to about ten meters due to the roughly six centimeter separation of our eyes. Depth perception is more complex than eye separation distance. By the above measurement, most ball sports would be nearly impossible. We all still play baseball. The reality is that we use multiple techniques for judging distance. Our heads move, increasing the separation between observations (see any owl scoping out prey before launching). Lens focus ads another flow of information. And we judge distance to distant objects using their apparent positions relative to others closer to us. Talk to anyone who has lost an eye. They are perfectly capable of driving cars and throwing balls accurately well beyond ten meters.

treeman79 6y ago
My eyes didn’t work together until I got prism glasses. I was utterly shocked to experience depth perception. Didn’t know it was missing.
- nickff 6y ago
  I've read that nearly half of people have low/no depth perception, and use a variety of other cues to judge distance. Sorry, but I don't have the citation handy.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    It really doesn’t effect me. I can turn it off by using normal glasses. Minor movements reveal depth of most things.
riversflow 6y ago
>Talk to anyone who lost an eye. My mom has amblyopia and is old enough that it didn’t get treated. She can drive just fine, but she can’t grab the clothes line between her fingers. She has to sort of paw at it and catch it with her palm. And I’d say visual processing is a lot more complex then we give it credit for. We don’t understand what’s really all going on yet. We still are trying to understand microsaccades for example. Ocular processing is extremely fascinating.

random5634 6y ago

Lidar is kind of magic. The cost of tech seems to reduce pretty substantially over time. When folks argue that lidar should not be used - other than cost I don't get it, it seems to give you some great added awareness of environment, especially looking at for example Waymo and some others really advancing things in this space. 5 years from now? Going to be pretty slick?

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
> When folks argue that lidar should not be used This is a strawman. Nobody argues that it should not be used, only that driving is demonstrably possible without it.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  I believe tesla argues this
- snet0 6y ago
  > “Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> Like, one appendix is bad Except that the appendix is a useful organ. Had it been truly useless it would have evolved away long ago, yet we find dinosaurs had them too. I think Musk is also wrong about lidar. It probably does have a place in this problem even if, like his blind spot re the appendix, Musk doesn't currently understand what that place may be. "Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No More" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.h...
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

> Given engineering, space, and styling limitations, this typically results in a small unit placed forward of the rear-view mirror with cameras spaced only about 20cm apart It's startling how hard it is to get a vehicle project to change anything. A non-structural but rigid pressed-steel truss that goes somewhere behind the grille of the vehicle would make this software compromise unnecessary. I'm aware that Tesla basically took Mobileye's single-camera product off the shelf, but I wish someone in the Model S development team could have added that dual-camera structure as a requirement on Day 1.

Johnny555 6y ago
One advantage of keeping it behind the windshield (aside from having a higher point of view), is that they get automatic camera cleaning from the windshield wipers (plus defrosting). If they put it lower behind the grill, then they need a completely separate cleaning/defrosting system. My car's lower bumper mounted radar antenna stops working any time I drive in the snow because it quickly gets coated with a layer of snow.
- yarcob 6y ago
  You also get a better view of the road the higher up you mount the camera.

mike_d 6y ago

Can we please ban paid self-written fluff pieces from Forbes.com? (forbes.com/sites/*) Flagging this.

jshevek 6y ago
> "If you flag..." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

HN headlines like this don't make me go, "Wow!" They make me think, "So you're saying there's a larger chance that the software is going to mistake that brick for something else because it has that much more granular detail."

KaiserPro 6y ago

It sure is a puff piece. I was going to reject it out of hand. In fact I was in the middle of slating it when I actually looked up how hammerhead sharks see. I learnt that hammerhead sharks have really good binocular vision. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/8376740.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/837...) I am wary of the depth map they've provided. It looks suspiciously smooth and stable. Given that roads have little to no features of use, the belief propagation must be very good (or its been tarted up in post.) I assume they use feature matching to estimate the camera movement, and the those same features are compared from each camera to get the divergence. I would be interested to see the calibration setup, and how it performs at speed.

kcolford 6y ago

Question for others on HN: What if you used many cameras in a row, each separated from its neighbour by a single stiff anchor like a chain of Mobileyes? Then perform calculations between each neighbouring camera and gradually build up the necessary correction between the two cameras at the outermost points.

Ekaros 6y ago

Shouldn't it be able to do that much anyway? Considering potential conditions of highway speed and either heavy rain, snow or black ice... A brick is pretty big object and 150m can be quite close...

Proven 6y ago

Great. Can they stop bothering us with captchas now?