As we all know, in the self-driving technology, Tesla insists on a pure visual solution, that is, only use cameras, no lidar, and even millimeter-wave radar.
However, because of this, many people complain about Tesla, saying that if only the camera is used, in the case of bad light, it is completely unclear and easy to cause misjudgment.
So is it really impossible to see clearly with the camera in the case of bad light? Not necessarily, Musk recently revealed a new technology, that is, when using cameras, it is necessary to kill ISPs.
Isp is an image information processor whose role is to process the information obtained by cmOS sensors and turn it into an image that the human eye can understand.
Musk's technology is that the information obtained by the CMOS sensor is directly processed with the original information without going through the ISP.
In Musk's view, no matter how advanced the ISP is, there will always be a part of the original photons that will be lost during processing to reach CMOS through the lens and convert into visible photons.
More specifically, when the light intensity is very low or very high, our human eye may not be able to see but the machine can still measure the number of photons, so it can still have image output, because CMOS, whether light or dark, can receive a lot of photons, so it can see things in the dark state.
But if the ISP is introduced to deal with it, because the human eye can't see clearly at night, the ISP will also have this information last year, if it does not go through the ISP, then this information will be retained, it can be recognized and calculated by the machine.
So Musk's plan is that the next technology, to remove the ISP, so that only the camera at night, no lidar, can also see things clearly, so as to achieve the same automatic driving function.
Of course, without ISP, the requirements for the algorithm are very high, and this is also a problem that Musk needs to solve, if this problem is really solved, then Tesla's pure visual autopilot will really usher in the spring, after all, the cost is too low.