| I am just a hobbyist but I can answer some of these. > Whats the difference between a “binocular” camera and two “monocular” cameras? For the camera itself, nothing. They are probably referring to the implementation. You can have two cameras side by side but unless you are using homography to estimate depth from the two images, then your setup is monocular. > How does a “binocular” camera get better depth information? A pixel in two images (with known separation) will have a geometric relationship that can be used to extract depth information. This is a lot faster than alternative methods with a single camera and multiple images. > Is using multiple cameras to drive sensor fusion? This is really just a question of semantics. > Why is absolute depth a strict safety win? Why is it better to have two eyes than one? You can be more certain about what you are seeing. > If this is just a handwavey upper bound on safety, how do you know that such a system can’t be safe enough for its design goals? If you had a system with infinite compute you could probably do enough math to calculate absolute depth with 100% certainty. I believe you can already extract absolute depth with something called bundle adjustment-- but it requires multiple images since you are relying on parallax effects. It is also computationally expensive. > If humans with only one eye are able to drive, why wouldn’t mono surround vision be at least as good as that? Computers are not humans. |