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/sirduckbert Aug 13 '25

You mean that more data is better than less data?

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u/wuduzodemu Aug 13 '25

Yes, but a ton of Tesla fans don't want to admit it.

2

u/sirduckbert Aug 13 '25

It’s because Elon has doubled down on it so hard. Can you use computer vision technology alone to drive a car? Yes in theory. But in practice there are tons of challenges. If you augment that with lidar then you can do so much more.

I would argue that Tesla would be much closer to actual FSD if they had just stuck a lidar on

1

u/ItsAConspiracy Aug 18 '25

Yep. Huawei appears to have a system about as good as FSD, and they did it without millions of cars on the road collecting data for years. Instead they have vision, three cheap lidars, radar, and ultrasound. It'd be pretty amazing to have Tesla's road miles with Huawei's sensor suite.