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by rsynnott 1278 days ago
Our ‘cameras’ are also so much better than any camera that could be put in a car (by most though not all metrics) that there is no real comparison.
1 comments

By which metrics are human eyes outperforming “any camera that can be put in a car today”? This seems unlikely in almost any domain, given the much wider dynamic range camera sensors can capture - cameras can see into spectrum we simply can’t (infrared, UV…) and operate at much lower levels of light than a human eyeball while retaining full color vision using really cheap tech. They also don’t get tired or worse with age, or forget to wear their glasses, which is nice.

This strikes me as a pretty odd statement to make, personally!

“There is no real comparison” - for the benefit of the less informed, please make the comparison, assuming you are able.

The human eye can perceive 21 stops dynamic range, much better than regular cameras. Event cameras might solve that issue, but they're not used other than in research at the moment.
Maybe in a single still capture? Let’s not forget cameras can easily combine multiple exposures into a single capture to substantially increase dynamic range, and can do so at high frame rates, and can go well beyond 21 stops in doing so. The human eye is stuck with the same ~21 stop range regardless.

If you use a pair of digital sensors with a 15 stop exposure offset between them (seems fair - humans have two…), thats ~30 stops in a single shot if we assume best we get is 15 from a digital sensor. Again though with high-speed exposure blending and one sensor this is not really necessary in a lot of cases.

The practical reality is digital capture can exceed 21 stops and you don’t need particularly fancy equipment to do it. Two decent cellphone grade sensors (~12-14 stops) would be enough if you don’t want to do single sensor blends and would work well for real-time video applications.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-exposure_HDR_capture

They can also "see" much further than the average human can [1].

The only way I could imagine that we are superior to phone cameras is stabilisation, something that could be resolved with vertical integration that informs the sensors and image processing units about forces being applied to the vehicle (though this is coming from somebody outside the field so take it with many grains of salt).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKMBx6x-lOI

The biggest difference between human vision and cameras is the fovea. Half of our optic nerves are concentrated in the visual area the size of our thumbnail with an outstretched arm. To replicate human vision you have to have a high resolution camera, downsample the image and then grant the AI access to high resolution imagery when requested.