Magellan55
Member
Musk has stated on numerous occasions that he firmly believes the sensor hardware available in current models is all that is needed. Some have questioned this logic, for various reasons - including stereoscopic vision, as well as radar sensor redundancy, but I will state that there is an area of study which reproduces stereo vision with a single camera operating multiple frames over time and distance. There have been studies, videos, and even educational coursework on this subject.
Here is one example of some prior work: Driving Computer Vision with Deep Learning
And he promised numerous times that the CPU in HW2 / 2.5 was powerful enough. So why do we all need HW3 now?
I already addressed the single camera issue - it works fine looking forward and when objects are moving relative to you. What's in your link looks just like what Tesla showed at the autonomy day briefing - a scene in front of the car where everything is panning relative to the car. The principle is the same as SAR - synthetic aperture radar - which has been around since the 1950's, so it's not that novel. The problem is when looking at other cars moving with you, such as when merging onto a highway, there's not enough relative angular motion for the computer vision algorithm to do it's thing. And that's why the car (at least my car) on NoA isn't confident merging onto a highway and doesn't show any cars in that lane I'm trying to move into - it's not sure what's there. Maybe it sees them, but can't figure out how close they are.
And it's possibly why it's not good at fast approaching cars either - until it can get both the rear and rear-side cameras on a car coming up from behind to triangulate, or that car gets close enough to have some angular motion, there's no motion one camera can detect as that car is approaching at a constant angle until it gets close. It would be different if the camera could pick up a doppler effect, but I'm not aware of that technology existing in the visible spectrum, as least for the small speed changes we're talking about. Or it could determine the car is getting "bigger" as it approaches, but in my opinion the rear facing cameras need to be higher resolution to pick that up from far enough away to be useful.
I guess we'll know in about a year...