Can Tesla vehicles see through fog using vision only? No Radar or Lidar needed.

[Richard V.]

Ref: Can Teslas see through fog?? Stanford research shows a way. - YouTube

* Stanford news article on the research: https://news.stanford.edu/2020/09/09/...
* The original research paper (Lindell and Wetzstein): https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146...

Very interesting and well explained by the author of this nicely researched and documented YouTube channel.

I also got the link to this following document from the same author.
D'oh! I had been looking for it: Tesla-Anti-Handbook-Handbook.pdf (ceconline.com)

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[Crissa]

Lidar is worse in fog because it travels through the fog twice. Radar isn't as high resolution and has weird echoes and refractions.

Camera based vision can use UV and IR, at sensitivities that Human vision can't see. It can discern minute differences in contrast.

-Crissa

 

[android04]

I know that cameras can see better than human eyes in snow and fog due to the different frequencies of light that they are sensitive to. I've tried to record videos in blizzard conditions to show relatives how little visibility there was (to human eyes), only to be surprised that on camera the visibility was better.

As far as glare from the sun blinding the cameras, I'm sure there are methods to mitigate that on the software side. In the early days of my Model 3 (more than 3.5 years ago) I would sometimes get messages from the car that Autopilot was disable due to glare from the rising sun in the mornings. I can't remember seeing any messages about that in the last few years, so I'm sure Tesla figured out a way to reduce the impact of glare and put it in a software update.

 

[Crissa]

It's a problem, but since there are multiple cameras watching multiple frequencies of light from multiple angles, the odds are that not all of them are occluded at the same time.

Just like you can close one eye to stop glare, the car has three forward cameras and then two overlapping ones from the sides?

Tesla's FSD still gets glared out once in awhile, but not as often now, no.

-Crissa

 

[FutureBoy]

Tesla's FSD still gets glared out once in awhile, but not as often now, no.

And anytime the cameras get glared out, human eyes (even with sunglasses) would most likely be glared out too. And driving in those conditions for any period of time (say on the salt flats portion of I80 headed west just before sunset) can be very taxing on the eyes. At least the cameras don’t get tired.

 

[Crissa]

Oh, no, cameras get permanently burned out because they don't slowly regenerate their photoreceptors.

-Crissa

 

[rr6013]

Oh, no, cameras get permanently burned out because they don't slowly regenerate their photoreceptors.

-Crissa

Have you knowledge of Tesla R&D into camera optics, frequency mapping and computational photogrammetry?

 

[Crissa]

Have you knowledge of Tesla R&D into camera optics, frequency mapping and computational photogrammetry?

In that it's really awesome. And they're using parallax in time as well as camera location to create a 3d map of voxels for the car to avoid.

I'm not great at the maths, but my spouse does this stuff ^-^

-Crissa

 

[FutureBoy]

Oh, no, cameras get permanently burned out because they don't slowly regenerate their photoreceptors.

-Crissa

Everything wears out in time. How long are you saying it takes to burn out the cameras?

 

[Crissa]

Everything wears out in time. How long are you saying it takes to burn out the cameras?

Directly connected to total light exposure.

Who knows, though?

-Crissa

 

[rr6013]

In that it's really awesome. And they're using parallax in time as well as camera location to create a 3d map of voxels for the car to avoid.

I'm not great at the maths, but my spouse does this stuff ^-^

-Crissa

Cameras see in low light, at night better than human - seems like 10X. It was shocking to see at night 4k video and same scene with naked eye in Realtime. No comparison. Parallax is def. computational Alien technology - beyond human naked eye capability stuff.

Fog would be mission creep for parallax and R&D in velocity prediction(VPP). Collision avoidance in fog-y conditions? Humans are snowblind judging distance in fog. They pull out in-front of cars in fog. And humans are incapable of deducing closing distance and closing velocity accurately in brain-overloaded fog-y driving.

Fog-y and snow-y share different conditions but similar collision avoidance scenarios. FSD technology that can extend a Tesla’s zone of safety, expand its reaction timing to threats and make Teslas less risky than humanly possible would be worth something.

 

[CyberGus]

Thermal is pretty cool (see what I did there?)

 

[ajdelange]

No, of course it can't. Use common sense.

Note that the technique described in the paper is "active". Cameras, lacking a controlled source of illumination, cannot use "gating", as the researchers did, to tell if there is something at a given range.

 

[firsttruck]

Thermal cameras can see tthrough fog and they are getting smaller & cheaper.

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It’s a foggy day and we took out our Mavic 2 Thermal Drone with the VuIR Boson for a spin
We know fog consists of small tiny droplets of water. And water absorbs heat radiation. So some how fog will affect the vision of a thermal camera - in theory.
Here we do see that the flir boson Thermal camera does see much better than a usual daylight camera through fog.
Dec 20, 2018


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Thermal and NV vs fog. Can thermal see through fog? What about night vision? Let's find out
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