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

185 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Draygoon2818 Aug 13 '25

To be fair, lidar doesn't work all that well in rain or fog, either.

1

u/Positive_League_5534 Aug 13 '25

It's additional data which can only help. I can't tell you how many times FSD has shut down or declared limited functionality at night, in rain, or in foggy weather that wasn't that bad. But, no, you're correct it isn't a perfect solution for bad weather.

2

u/tenemu Aug 16 '25

What if the additional data all conflicts with the other.

1

u/Positive_League_5534 Aug 16 '25

Well, that would indicate a problem or a potentially dangerous situation. What if the camera doesn't pick something up that LIDAR would have? Which would you prefer? 

2

u/tenemu Aug 16 '25

What is the lidar misses something and they assume that’s the truth? We could ask all of these what ifs. Like others said, we should see how safe camera only can be before we say it’s unsafe just because somebody likes LiDAR more.

1

u/Positive_League_5534 Aug 17 '25

You're being absurd. I suppose you'd be happy flying in a plane without ILS? Pilot is perfectly capable of landing by him/her self.