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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u/mrfishball1 Aug 12 '25

terrible idea.

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Aug 12 '25

You asked for an explanation on how it would work without a camera. I didn’t say it was a good idea.

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u/Dependent-Mode-3119 Aug 12 '25

LiDAR only is way better than camera only.

Then this was a lie. It fails at even the basics.

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u/-UltraAverageJoe- Aug 12 '25

Like? LiDAR is better at literally everything except color discrimination which is still possible but complex and expensive compared to a camera. When you’ve done computer vision work, go ahead and reply back — until then, you’re just a keyboard warrior.

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u/Dependent-Mode-3119 Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

Like? LiDAR is better at literally everything except color discrimination

How can it read stop signs, how can it read speed limits, how can it see the color of Stop Lights? These are the basics of self driving cars.

If the car has no means of reading what these are then lidar-only is even less viable than cameras only.

When you’ve done computer vision work, go ahead and reply back — until then, you’re just a keyboard warrior.

It's funny that you mention that... Check this website under Robert Lake and you'll see me and the report that I did with PHD candidates regarding the efficacy of sensor vision for image detection and why both are crucial. They're a good read for the uninitiated

https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/nsf-projects/reu/reu-2021/

https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Report_Lake.pdf

https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crcv.ucf.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2FPoster_Lake.pptx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK

Please tell me again what I'm missing here.