Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

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Trying to emulate human eyesight in self driving cars is hilariously misguided.

1. We have a computer behind our eyes so advanced that we may never be able to come close to replicating it. It is capable of identifying, tracking and predicting the behaviour of multiple objects in real-time even in reduced visibility and can infer new objects without training e.g. a green firetruck or a RV with a satellite dish.

2. Our eyes are connected to a very adaptive and movable object i.e. our head. In order to perceive depth and identity objects e.g. an actual person versus a photo of a person we continuously move our head around in multiple dimensions. A car can't do this.

I would refer everyone to the countless examples of Tesla's Autopilot recognising humans in bus signs, sides of trucks etc and attempting to do auto-avoidance. That is an unsolvable problem with only optical cameras.

> continuously move our head around in multiple dimensions. A car can't do this

Doesn't isn't can't. There's no reason why car-mounted hardware can't move just as much as eyes do.

Metal fatigue (and other wear and tear) might be a reason; our muscles are self healing and regenerating. It would likely be cheaper and less error prone to simply have more sensors, not moving at all or with much narrower ranges of motion to simulate depth perception. Training a computer to understand a simulacrum is an entirely different challenge, I think.

Of course cars can move their dozen or so cameras hundreds of times a second. But good luck getting a DNN to process all of that as well as the system handling tasks like identifying traffic lights, pedestrians.

Head of Tesla AI has already stated that even with the new Nvidia hardware they struggle to meet the computational requirements.

Those are two largely unrelated problems. Reconstructing geometry from multiple views is a separate (very well understood) problem from analysis to understand what the shapes mean.

They are completely related when you understand that there is a fixed computational budget in which to operate.

Not to mention for Tesla having to abandon all of their training data.

Where has Tesla ever said they needed to abandon all of their training data?

Head movement is a useful trick but it's a pretty minor improvement. Just having a few cameras with good separation will beat it.

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