For the first, I’m highly confident that no, 1280×960 is not sufficient for either Level 4 or Level 5 autonomous driving because it is barely enough resolution to see what is just in front of you. In order to make safe lane changes and to consistently differentiate between background “noise” and near-term traffic, you need higher resolution. In fact, if you want to read traffic signs at any meaningful distance in front of you, you need higher resolution. This is likely one of the reasons why sign recognition hasn’t been enabled yet – they cannot get it to work reliably because there is not enough resolution to consistently read signs until you are literally right upon them (which leaves no reaction time). I’d estimate that if you want confident L4 or L5 performance, a minimum resolution of 3840 x 2160 would be required to “zoom in” on far away signs, or even to read “dirty” signs that require significant image enhancement on the fly. I also have a nagging suspicion that false positive breaking events would go down as resolution increases as it would better enable the NN to differentiate what is currently causing “confusion”.
As far as 36 fps, that is a very strange frame rate. I wonder if that is a limitation for dashcam / sentry capture to keep file sizes down to a rational value. Otherwise, it feels like you want frame rate as fast as allowable to improve the overall accuracy of the system. I’d think 60 fps to 120 fps would probably be ideal when combined with a resolution of 3840 x 2160.
So ultimately, I think HW 3.0 gets us to some confident L3 equivalent AutoPilot. There will need to be lots of manual override heuristics to create the illusion of better performance, and likely that will wind up being a mixed bag that limits approval for offering a robotaxi service or anything like it.
Hopefully, HW 4.0+ will invest heavily in camera resolution and frame rate processing.
That said, I am skeptical that Tesla will offer HW 3.0 owners upgrades to HW 4.0 as they will consider feature complete with aggressive heuristics sufficient.
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