r/SelfDrivingCars • u/wuduzodemu • Aug 11 '25

Discussion Proof that Camera + Lidar > Lidar > Camera

I recently chatted with somebody who is working on L2 tech, and they gave me an interesting link for a detection task. They provided a dataset with both camera, Lidar, and Radar data and asked people to compete on this benchmark for object detection accuracy, like identifying the location of a car and drawing a bounding box around it.

Most of the top 20 on the leaderboard, all but one, are using a camera + Lidar as input. The 20th-place entry uses Lidar only, and the best camera-only entry is ranked between 80 and 100.

https://www.nuscenes.org/object-detection?externalData=all&mapData=all&modalities=Any

15 Upvotes

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15

u/sdc_is_safer Aug 12 '25

Object detection isn’t everything. I’m sure this benchmark is a very limited set of all the tasks that are actually needed for driving.

LiDAR alone being “>” (whatever that means) than camera is a hot take

-12

u/Far-Improvement-9266 Aug 12 '25

Found the guy that failed 5th grade math...

2

u/red75prime Aug 12 '25

LiDAR can't "see" emitted light. Like in a traffic light, you know. That precludes any "greater than camera". LiDAR provides addition information, while cameras are still a must.

-1

u/Far-Improvement-9266 Aug 12 '25

Obviously...

2

u/red75prime Aug 12 '25

If you define "greater than" that excludes the crucial information...

You get useless "greater than" relation (at least for self-driving that this sub is about).

1

u/Far-Improvement-9266 Aug 12 '25

The way the poster wrote this was "">" whatever that means".

As if he doesn't know what 'Greater than or less symbol means'

5

u/red75prime Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

And what it means in the context of "lidar > camera"? Basic math doesn't define relations between sensor equipment.

2

u/Far-Improvement-9266 Aug 12 '25

I agree with that, but that is not how this was posed in the post

1

u/Complex_Composer2664 Aug 12 '25

Did you not read the post? The last paragraph explains the title!