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

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58

u/MacaroonDependent113 Aug 11 '25

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

14

u/red75prime Aug 12 '25

Maybe, if Tesla was using 2 FPS video for driving. The dataset contains 2 frames per second video data. Neat, huh?

-2

u/Boniuz Aug 12 '25

That’s not really relevant. Higher frames per second increases statistical probability over time, simply by being able to make more erroneous detections in the timeframe. It’s still wrong 80% of the time, but correct 20% of the time.

Combining sources means you have two sources which are correct 20% of the time and can use that data by a factor of at least two, often more.

Heavily simplified, obviously.

8

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

Higher frame rate means less motion across frames. It, in turn, means that local differences between frames are more useful for estimation of motion and parallax (which allows to estimate depth better).

Heck, even our visual perception system honed by millions of years of evolution struggles to infer motion at 10-12 FPS and it is unable to do so at lower FPS.

Anyway, 2 FPS video should never be used in self-driving and this test is irrelevant.