Re:Lidar Is a Crutch
by skohan on Thursday January 31, 2019 @10:50AM
(#19045570)
The point stands though; we use our binocular vision to assemble a 3D representation of the world through neural networks. Why not skip some of the middle steps if we can design a system which already gets an accurate distance field as input?
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Because you lose color and end up with a HUGELY lower amount of data. Lidar is quite expensive, so you end up with a few of them.
Tesla has something like 10 cameras running 1280x960 @ fps or similar. With so few data points (and no color) you can't identify similar vehicles. After all snow plows, school busses, ambulances, bikes, motorcycles, police, etc all have different behaviors. Some even signal cars with spot lights, police red/blue lights, brake lights, blinking high beams, etc. All would be invisible to lidar and contribute to lidar controlled cars acting less like human driven cars.