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> Wow. I don’t know how anything without night vision wouldn’t have hit that. It’s practically invisible. Radar and Lidar work in the dark. But yes, this is a

> Wow. I don’t know how anything without night vision wouldn’t have hit that. It’s practically invisible. Radar and Lidar work in the dark. But yes, this is a problem with optical-only, especially since the camera-systems Tesla uses are pretty badly spec'd (1.2MP, not even 1080p) Tesla _used_ to have a RADAR system installed. But stopped installing them and rewrote the software to get rid of it earlier this year.

jeffreygoesto 5y ago
That is actually a benefit for low light conditions. Less resolution = bigger pixels = better efficiency.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  https://www.eetasia.com/teslas-hardware-retrofits-for-model-3/ https://www.eetasia.com/teslas-hardware-retrofits-for-model-... > ON Semi AR0136A with 3.75 um Pixel size at 1280×960 1.2Mp resolution This is a pretty crap camera / sensor. The ON Semi documentation suggests its a 1/3" sensor size: https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136at https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136... Your iPhone 13 has a 1/1.9" wide sensor, significantly larger... and multiples of them working as a team. Even if we go back to 2018: the Google Pixel 2 has a 1/2.6" sensor, still much larger (and with better resolution) than what this Tesla is using to see the road. ---------- If you want better night vision, then use a bigger sensor. Its just basic physics. A sensor with 2x the area will capture 2x the photons. Complaining that this car can't see the road at night... well.... yeah. Its got an tiny camera sensor. What did you expect? Its got bad night vision.
  - jeffreygoesto 5y ago
    ADAS must use qualified chips and that one was a pretty standard one some years ago. I like others better, but you must see them in system context and be able to continuously process that stream. Given the power budget and other constraints this was what a number of manufacturers ended up with. After all these guys are not dumb, they just need to desing in many more aspects than mobile phones.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      That's a good point and some basic searches seem to confirm your assertions.
      - jeffreygoesto 5y ago
        I hope so, I'm in that field since 2003, started with the first night vision system in series production and built an number of those systems since. One of the problems is tenperature range. Driving continuiusly in Death Valley can heat up your camera to the point it runs away into thermal self destruction, if you don't take counter measures. This is not a problem for mobile phones. Another issue is continuously processing uncompressed data. Mobile phones compress with hardware support, especially in video mode. I had one of my mobiles shut down during a long video conference. This must not happen to an assistance system.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Couldn’t an infrared camera have helped? black paint is not anyways black in infrared, and the recently-crashed car would likely have a heat signature. I wonder if they would have to start from scratch with their training data, or if black and white could be used for everything.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  The RADAR that Tesla used to ship with (and older Teslas used to use before FSD12 disabled it) would have almost certainly seen the truck in this specific case. The issue with RADAR was allegedly phantom braking, if Tesla marketing was to be believed. But other companies seem to have RADAR systems that work. ------ Its fine to use 1.2 MP 1/3" CMOS sensors as part of a general-purpose sensor network (which may include RADAR, ultrasonic, and cheap Cameras all working together). I think LIDAR is still needed to really make things work, but RADAR + Cameras seem to cover a wide variety of cases. What's a problem is when Tesla starts removing RADAR and pretends its an advantage. (Look, they couldn't figure out the RADAR false-positive problem, and there's a chip shortage right now anyway. So they just... stopped using RADAR)
  - sidibe 5y ago
    > The issue with RADAR was allegedly phantom braking, if Tesla marketing was to be believed. But other companies seem to have RADAR systems that work. And the phantom braking hasn't improved without radar. As with so many things at Tesla, this was clearly a cost-cutting or supply-constraint inspired move masquerading as some technological advance.

jeffreygoesto 5y ago

That is actually a benefit for low light conditions. Less resolution = bigger pixels = better efficiency.

dragontamer 5y ago
https://www.eetasia.com/teslas-hardware-retrofits-for-model-3/ https://www.eetasia.com/teslas-hardware-retrofits-for-model-... > ON Semi AR0136A with 3.75 um Pixel size at 1280×960 1.2Mp resolution This is a pretty crap camera / sensor. The ON Semi documentation suggests its a 1/3" sensor size: https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136at https://www.onsemi.com/products/sensors/image-sensors/ar0136... Your iPhone 13 has a 1/1.9" wide sensor, significantly larger... and multiples of them working as a team. Even if we go back to 2018: the Google Pixel 2 has a 1/2.6" sensor, still much larger (and with better resolution) than what this Tesla is using to see the road. ---------- If you want better night vision, then use a bigger sensor. Its just basic physics. A sensor with 2x the area will capture 2x the photons. Complaining that this car can't see the road at night... well.... yeah. Its got an tiny camera sensor. What did you expect? Its got bad night vision.
- jeffreygoesto 5y ago
  ADAS must use qualified chips and that one was a pretty standard one some years ago. I like others better, but you must see them in system context and be able to continuously process that stream. Given the power budget and other constraints this was what a number of manufacturers ended up with. After all these guys are not dumb, they just need to desing in many more aspects than mobile phones.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    That's a good point and some basic searches seem to confirm your assertions.
    - jeffreygoesto 5y ago
      I hope so, I'm in that field since 2003, started with the first night vision system in series production and built an number of those systems since. One of the problems is tenperature range. Driving continuiusly in Death Valley can heat up your camera to the point it runs away into thermal self destruction, if you don't take counter measures. This is not a problem for mobile phones. Another issue is continuously processing uncompressed data. Mobile phones compress with hardware support, especially in video mode. I had one of my mobiles shut down during a long video conference. This must not happen to an assistance system.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Couldn’t an infrared camera have helped? black paint is not anyways black in infrared, and the recently-crashed car would likely have a heat signature. I wonder if they would have to start from scratch with their training data, or if black and white could be used for everything.

dragontamer 5y ago
The RADAR that Tesla used to ship with (and older Teslas used to use before FSD12 disabled it) would have almost certainly seen the truck in this specific case. The issue with RADAR was allegedly phantom braking, if Tesla marketing was to be believed. But other companies seem to have RADAR systems that work. ------ Its fine to use 1.2 MP 1/3" CMOS sensors as part of a general-purpose sensor network (which may include RADAR, ultrasonic, and cheap Cameras all working together). I think LIDAR is still needed to really make things work, but RADAR + Cameras seem to cover a wide variety of cases. What's a problem is when Tesla starts removing RADAR and pretends its an advantage. (Look, they couldn't figure out the RADAR false-positive problem, and there's a chip shortage right now anyway. So they just... stopped using RADAR)
- sidibe 5y ago
  > The issue with RADAR was allegedly phantom braking, if Tesla marketing was to be believed. But other companies seem to have RADAR systems that work. And the phantom braking hasn't improved without radar. As with so many things at Tesla, this was clearly a cost-cutting or supply-constraint inspired move masquerading as some technological advance.