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According to a [PDF] paper to be presented at the 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 15-21 in Long beach, California, researchers have discovered a "simple, cost-effective, and accurate new method" of enabling self driving cars to recognize 3d objects in their path.
Currently bulky expensive lasers, scanners, and specialized GPS receivers are used in LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors and mounted on top of the vehicle. This causes increased drag as well as being unsightly and adding another ~$10,000 to the price tag. Until now, this has been the only viable option.
Cornell researchers have discovered that a simpler method, using two inexpensive cameras on either side of the windshield, can detect objects with nearly LiDAR's accuracy and at a fraction of the cost. The researchers found that analyzing the captured images from a bird's eye view rather than the more traditional frontal view more than tripled their accuracy, making stereo cameras a viable and low-cost alternative to LiDAR.
According to the paper, which goes into this in considerable depth, it is not the quality of images and data which causes the difference in accuracy, but the representation of the data. Adjusting this brings the object detection results using far less expensive camera data for 3D image-analysis up to nearly the same effectiveness as much more expensive LiDAR.
Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computer science and senior author of the paper, notes that
stereo cameras could potentially be used as the primary way of identifying objects in lower-cost cars, or as a backup method in higher-end cars that are also equipped with LiDAR.
The paper concludes that future work may improve image-based 3D object detection using the denser data feed from cameras further, fully closing the gap with LiDAR.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @01:32PM
I'm willing to bet that the self-driving car will also have access to a speedometer.
Whatever sensors the braking-distance warning uses, will likely also be included in the self-driving car. The rest is already software anyway (and an optical/acoustic signalling device, which the self-driving car won't need).
It won't need mnemonics, as doing calculations and reliably storing and retrieving data is exactly what computers excel at.
I also don't see why self-driving cars would have less powerful brakes.
The self-driving cars also will likely have the same sensors as a normal car. The early-warning system? Well, apart from those sensors that already is just computer code. There's no reason to assume that the computer code in the self-driving car won't be able to do what the computer code of those much simpler systems already are able to do.
And guess what human-driven cars do not have? LIDAR.
No. It's another story, much older than electronic computers: Trying to bring down cost. Make a LIDAR system that's cheaper than two cameras, and they will happily throw out those cameras for LIDAR.