A human seems to be able to differentiate pretty reliably (although not perfectly) between dry spots and drywall. And at 50 meters, I expect that binocular vision doesn't do much.
I wonder if people can use parallax (i.e. road being revealed differently) for a 2 inch object like drywall at those kinds of distances and speeds. Parallax is uses in Google's latest software lens blur, so I'm sure it's been in robot cars since the beginning.
Less that perceive the depth (2 inches at 50 meters is tough, especially from above) but that we're really good at pattern matching (vague square thing in the road? likely not road).
You can think of parallax as stereo vision repeated over and over again with different cameras. Cameras/depth sensing has a hard time at range, since the resolution for depth decreases rapidly towards subpixel.
A human seems to be able to differentiate pretty reliably (although not perfectly) between dry spots and drywall. And at 50 meters, I expect that binocular vision doesn't do much.
I wonder if people can use parallax (i.e. road being revealed differently) for a 2 inch object like drywall at those kinds of distances and speeds. Parallax is uses in Google's latest software lens blur, so I'm sure it's been in robot cars since the beginning.