[rjdagost]

There's a reason why almost everyone pursuing autonomous driving uses lidar despite the high costs. It's because lidar has extremely good "recall" and "precision" in most driving conditions. In other words, if an object is present on or near the road, lidar will almost certainly detect it (high recall), and it has very rare false positive detections (high precision). Lidar also directly provides distance information. For pure camera based approaches, we've seen huge improvements in recall in the past decade, but unfortunately we still need orders of magnitude reductions in the false negative rate to be good enough for safety critical applications. I think pure computer vision approaches will get there someday, but we first need some fundamental changes in CV algorithms in my opinion. Hopefully with increasing adoption, lidar will get significantly cheaper.