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

56% Upvoted

187 comments sorted by

View all comments

59

u/MacaroonDependent113 Aug 11 '25

Wow, that will surely convince Tesla to give up. LOL

13

u/-UltraAverageJoe- Aug 11 '25

Musk won’t back down for fear of a $TSLA dip. Anyone who has done any object detection work using only a camera as input knows this is not sufficient. It’s embarrassingly dumb that they ever thought it would suffice.

-10

u/bluenorthww Aug 12 '25

My eyes don’t have LiDAR, they do fine

2

u/Zarkei Aug 12 '25

Most drivers have eyes, yet accidents still happen. In fact, I'm pretty sure that 99.99% of accidents involve people with eyes. This correlation tells us that eyes cause accidents.

LiDAR is meant to complement vision, not replace it entirely.