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Comment by jcun4128 | Hacker News Reader

Would be cool to know what approaches they take. Stereo and then perspective scaling (smaller thing are farther away) and then probably a blend of spice of ML for recognizing things/knowing expected scale on the fly... idk I'm arm-chair skeptical of vision only but humans do it.

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Actually on the small downtown streets of my home city they allow parking too close to the intersection such that the view of my civic doesn't allow me to see particularly far down a relatively busy one way street. To compensate for this I roll down the window to listen for tire noise. Maybe not strictly necessary but I'm not sure its quite true to say that people drive by vision 100 percent of the time. Of course they could just add a fisheye mirror on each intersections street or roll back the parking but still. Another example that comes to mind is those old one lane tunnels where you have to stop at the edge and listen for a honk for a few seconds, honk and then go.

Parking too close to the intersection is the bane of my existence in my home city. If someone decides to park their lifted 4runner anywhere on the block, say goodbye to seeing oncoming traffic -- it just becomes a game of russian roulette, trying to cross the street. And I drive a (small) SUV!

> Would be cool to know what approaches they take

An increasingly complex set of if / else statements.

Is it a left turn? Is it a stationary emergency vehicle? Is it a small child? Don't worry, it's all software and we'll keep sending OTA updates until we catch every edge case.

Yeah it's just amazing to have this real time world system chewing through data. Particularly if say they're taking a picture and pulling points from it and doing that at some refresh rate/computing... idk just cool.

And the loops checking like "I accelerated, it has been this much time, did I actually move 10 meters" or whatever. Then you check if something stationary shrunk by that much in size from the camera perspective...

Side tangent but some drones use this cool technology called "visual inertial odometry"

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