Perception with Extreme Dynamic Range
Pushing the limits with the photon-level accuracy of Ubicept’s solution
In our previous blog posts about perception in indoor and outdoor scenarios, we highlighted how the Ubicept solution was able to improve perception in low light. But what about bright daylight environments?
Modern automotive sensors often tout their ability to handle wide dynamic range, or large differences between the brightest and darkest areas of the scene. Drivers are well aware of how difficult it is to see, for instance, when they round a turn and catch the glare of the afternoon sun.
While the wide dynamic range performance of automotive sensors has improved dramatically in the past few years, they still have difficulty handling the most extreme scenarios. Take, for instance, this example of a vehicle entering a short tunnel and then catching the reflection of the sun off the road:
That’s a very short clip, so let’s break it down! Here’s what we see at the beginning:
With the automotive camera, the road on the other side of the tunnel is quite clear, but it’s very difficult to see what’s inside of it. Some detail can be recovered by artificially increasing the gain (as we did with our night ADAS test) but it’s clear that there’s not much there:
As the vehicle continues into the tunnel, the automotive camera increases its exposure, but the same types of blocky digital artifacts can be seen:
Shortly afterwards, the automatic exposure of automotive camera “catches up” to the darker environment, which increases the amount of detail captured in the tunnel but blows out the road entirely:
Clearly, the automotive camera is being pushed beyond its limits in this example. By comparison, the advanced hardware and software of the Ubicept solution is able to capture detail inside and outside the tunnel without any exposure adjustments whatsoever.
The full-resolution version of this example can be seen in our demo video. If you’d like to learn more about how Ubicept can help your perception system handle extreme dynamic range scenarios, please feel free to contact us any time!