5 ms·

Can you cite some practical failure scenarios besides a wile e coyote billboard where camera inherently won't be able to accomplish what lidar/radar do?

precommunicator 1y ago
I was driving in convoy over closed (to non-convoy driving) mountain pass in Norway, in winter. Everything was white, you could barely see the road. Snow was so heavy that visibility stretched as far as the car before me, you couldn't see further than that. At some point a snow plug passed on the other side of the road and completely covered my windshield with snow, to the point that for a few second I had no visibility whatsoever. Good luck to cameras then.
- metadat 1y ago
  In case it's helpful to know, Lidar also struggles to perform well in heavy snow due to the scattering and reflection of laser beams by snowflakes, which reduces the detectable range and can create false readings.
- joshfee 1y ago
  But you are also only a camera without LIDAR or RADAR, and you apparently navigated that situation successfully...
aorloff 1y ago
There are advertisements on the sides of trucks. Better question is why you are willing to dismiss the wile e coyote failure demonstration.
- aeternum 1y ago
  The wile e cayote failure was using tesla's cruise control rather than FSD. Binocular vision is sufficient. Lidar will likely be outlawed anyway as it burns your retina. Dare you to put your eye (or cellphone camera) next to a waymo sensor for 10 sec and see what happens.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    FSD catapults families into highway dividers, I'm pretty sure LIDAR will be fine
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    Virtually all LIDARs are class 1 devices, safe for human eyes to look at. Do you have any reason to believe Waymo LIDARs aren't class 1?
    - aeternum 1y ago
      The rapid rotation and your blink reflex is apparently what makes it class 1 (supposedly). I don't see how a blink occurs if it isn't in visible spectrum. The science around the safety is very shaky, many tests look at only retina and not cornea damage. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safety-questions-raised-about-1550-nm-lidar https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet... Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        The damage at those wavelengths is just overheating. Your eyes are mainly water with its absurdly high heat capacity compared to pretty much anything in an image sensor. I'd expect eyes to be much more resilient in short duration, high intensity exposures and significantly better at long duration, low intensity exposures. LIDARs have been shifting towards short duration exposures to get higher intensities (for range) in recent years, simply to stay under the class 1 limits.
        aeternum 1y ago
        Heat damage doesn't make it safe, eyes are very sensitive to heat and while the cornea provides some protection, not everyone has a thick cornea due to surgery, and there is also evidence that heating the cornea causes cataracts. The short exposure is putting a lot of faith in these device manufacturers. How do they guarantee short duration, are you confident that each manufacturer has sufficient electronics to stop the laser if the spinning slows slightly due to dirt, low power or a crash? Should the exposure limits be the same during day vs. night when your pupils are dilated?
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. The question is whether you can put enough compute and data together into a car to be able to do it live. Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. Eh, I mean I think that that’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient. Eyes are _really good_.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Fair point! Is there some advantage eyes have that wouldn't be surmountable with simply more cameras (i.e. to capture different exposure ranges etc)? I actually haven't thought about this side of it super closely, but I think you're right.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      It's a question of cost and technology. Cinema cameras don't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just because studios like spending money. Humans can see differences between even the best cameras on the market. It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways. It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
    - apothegm 1y ago
      Resolution; extreme dynamic range in a single exposure; sensitivity with short exposures in low light; focal range and speed of refocusing; white point adjustments (happening to a large degree in the retina as receptors become temporarily desensitized to a given wavelength with uninterrupted exposure). I’m sure there are more.
walls 1y ago
How about this? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv...
moralestapia 1y ago
Sure, anything that involves fog.
kadoban 1y ago
Shiny truck trailers have been a failure case. A reflection of the sky in a truck back looks a lot like the sky from the right angle.
jameskilton 1y ago
Shadows. Everyone I know who's tried FSD learns very quickly that it's a random chance that the car will see an oncoming shadow (big truck, bridge, tree, etc) as a wall and either slam on the brakes or swerve. If you have reliable depth information, ala LIDAR, you'll be able to know that there's nothing actually there.
xnx 1y ago
Fog

precommunicator 1y ago

I was driving in convoy over closed (to non-convoy driving) mountain pass in Norway, in winter. Everything was white, you could barely see the road. Snow was so heavy that visibility stretched as far as the car before me, you couldn't see further than that. At some point a snow plug passed on the other side of the road and completely covered my windshield with snow, to the point that for a few second I had no visibility whatsoever. Good luck to cameras then.

metadat 1y ago
In case it's helpful to know, Lidar also struggles to perform well in heavy snow due to the scattering and reflection of laser beams by snowflakes, which reduces the detectable range and can create false readings.
joshfee 1y ago
But you are also only a camera without LIDAR or RADAR, and you apparently navigated that situation successfully...

aorloff 1y ago

There are advertisements on the sides of trucks. Better question is why you are willing to dismiss the wile e coyote failure demonstration.

aeternum 1y ago
The wile e cayote failure was using tesla's cruise control rather than FSD. Binocular vision is sufficient. Lidar will likely be outlawed anyway as it burns your retina. Dare you to put your eye (or cellphone camera) next to a waymo sensor for 10 sec and see what happens.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  FSD catapults families into highway dividers, I'm pretty sure LIDAR will be fine
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  Virtually all LIDARs are class 1 devices, safe for human eyes to look at. Do you have any reason to believe Waymo LIDARs aren't class 1?
  - aeternum 1y ago
    The rapid rotation and your blink reflex is apparently what makes it class 1 (supposedly). I don't see how a blink occurs if it isn't in visible spectrum. The science around the safety is very shaky, many tests look at only retina and not cornea damage. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safety-questions-raised-about-1550-nm-lidar https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet... Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      The damage at those wavelengths is just overheating. Your eyes are mainly water with its absurdly high heat capacity compared to pretty much anything in an image sensor. I'd expect eyes to be much more resilient in short duration, high intensity exposures and significantly better at long duration, low intensity exposures. LIDARs have been shifting towards short duration exposures to get higher intensities (for range) in recent years, simply to stay under the class 1 limits.
      - aeternum 1y ago
        Heat damage doesn't make it safe, eyes are very sensitive to heat and while the cornea provides some protection, not everyone has a thick cornea due to surgery, and there is also evidence that heating the cornea causes cataracts. The short exposure is putting a lot of faith in these device manufacturers. How do they guarantee short duration, are you confident that each manufacturer has sufficient electronics to stop the laser if the spinning slows slightly due to dirt, low power or a crash? Should the exposure limits be the same during day vs. night when your pupils are dilated?

sorcerer-mar 1y ago

Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. The question is whether you can put enough compute and data together into a car to be able to do it live. Why even bother when we can make artificial eyes that see depth? The price of LIDAR has plummeted and will continue to plummet. We already know that it works really, really well for self-driving with today's available compute+data.

rsynnott 1y ago
> Cameras can obviously work at least as well as a human if they're attached to a human brain. Eh, I mean I think that that’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient. Eyes are _really good_.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  Fair point! Is there some advantage eyes have that wouldn't be surmountable with simply more cameras (i.e. to capture different exposure ranges etc)? I actually haven't thought about this side of it super closely, but I think you're right.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    It's a question of cost and technology. Cinema cameras don't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just because studios like spending money. Humans can see differences between even the best cameras on the market. It's also a bit of a false analogy. Cameras don't really work like human vision. We do things like mesopic vision that simply aren't possible with current sensors. We have massively high resolution. We have async "pixels" that can respond immediately without waiting for a framing signal. Our brains process color in truly weird ways. It's not like there's some physical law preventing computer vision from being better than human vision, but it's an incredibly difficult engineering problem that we've spent the better part of a century attacking without clearly winning.
  - apothegm 1y ago
    Resolution; extreme dynamic range in a single exposure; sensitivity with short exposures in low light; focal range and speed of refocusing; white point adjustments (happening to a large degree in the retina as receptors become temporarily desensitized to a given wavelength with uninterrupted exposure). I’m sure there are more.

walls 1y ago

How about this? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driving-crash/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv...

moralestapia 1y ago

Sure, anything that involves fog.

kadoban 1y ago

Shiny truck trailers have been a failure case. A reflection of the sky in a truck back looks a lot like the sky from the right angle.

jameskilton 1y ago

Shadows. Everyone I know who's tried FSD learns very quickly that it's a random chance that the car will see an oncoming shadow (big truck, bridge, tree, etc) as a wall and either slam on the brakes or swerve. If you have reliable depth information, ala LIDAR, you'll be able to know that there's nothing actually there.

xnx 1y ago

Fog