Aroohoo
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #1
Now that I've had my R1 for a few days, I've had the chance to play with several features. One of the things that I had been curious about is all of the talk about why the front camera is so bad. The following pulls from some of the stuff picked up decades ago while working on a facial recognition system for my University graduation project (this just makes me sound smart...in reality, this is quite obvious when you look at it and after reading this before publishing I didn't actually use much, if any, of that knowledge
).
TLDR: Rivian is displaying a low resolution image with distortions from the fish eye front camera on a high resolution display.
When I first saw the front camera view, I had suspected that we were dealing with an issue of showing a low resolution image on a high resolution display. Specifically I had thought that they were using a low resolution camera (e.g. 150k pixel displayed on a 2MP display). But after looking at some of the gear guard videos it became clear that the issue is they are cropping the camera view for the forward camera.
The first picture below is one of the front camera view. The second picture is one from the gear guard view with a red square super imposed above it to show the frame the camera front view camera is using from the camera sensor.
My hunch that they were using a lower resolution image for the front camera view was correct, just not totally in the manner that I had thought. Essentially what we are seeing here is that Rivian is cropping the camera output to the middle of the view where there is less 'fish eye' effect and provides a more "usable" view (seeing the bumper doesn't help anyone). So, we are essentially seeing a low resolution image on a large display screen resulting in a very grainy image.
The other source of distortion is that they aren't correcting for the 'fish-eye' effect. In the picture below, the red line (which follows the street cub) should be straight (a straight line from the end points is drawn in green). Given that they are cropping in the middle of the image, the amount of distortion is limited, however it does contribute to the image appearing to be less than ideal.
All camera lenses have some distortion associated with them. In applications that need non distorted images (e.g. high accuracy robotic vision), a correction/calibration factor is measured for each individual lens and is corrected for that application. For other applications where correction is desired but the cost for individual calibration doesn't justify the benefit, a general correction/calibration factor is obtained by measuring the distortion from a sample of lenses and applying those measure measurements as a correction factor.
For those that are curious on correcting lens distortion, the following are good technical reads:
http://paulbourke.net/dome/fisheyecorrect/
https://docs.nvidia.com/vpi/sample_fisheye.html
).TLDR: Rivian is displaying a low resolution image with distortions from the fish eye front camera on a high resolution display.
When I first saw the front camera view, I had suspected that we were dealing with an issue of showing a low resolution image on a high resolution display. Specifically I had thought that they were using a low resolution camera (e.g. 150k pixel displayed on a 2MP display). But after looking at some of the gear guard videos it became clear that the issue is they are cropping the camera view for the forward camera.
The first picture below is one of the front camera view. The second picture is one from the gear guard view with a red square super imposed above it to show the frame the camera front view camera is using from the camera sensor.
My hunch that they were using a lower resolution image for the front camera view was correct, just not totally in the manner that I had thought. Essentially what we are seeing here is that Rivian is cropping the camera output to the middle of the view where there is less 'fish eye' effect and provides a more "usable" view (seeing the bumper doesn't help anyone). So, we are essentially seeing a low resolution image on a large display screen resulting in a very grainy image.
The other source of distortion is that they aren't correcting for the 'fish-eye' effect. In the picture below, the red line (which follows the street cub) should be straight (a straight line from the end points is drawn in green). Given that they are cropping in the middle of the image, the amount of distortion is limited, however it does contribute to the image appearing to be less than ideal.
All camera lenses have some distortion associated with them. In applications that need non distorted images (e.g. high accuracy robotic vision), a correction/calibration factor is measured for each individual lens and is corrected for that application. For other applications where correction is desired but the cost for individual calibration doesn't justify the benefit, a general correction/calibration factor is obtained by measuring the distortion from a sample of lenses and applying those measure measurements as a correction factor.
For those that are curious on correcting lens distortion, the following are good technical reads:
http://paulbourke.net/dome/fisheyecorrect/
https://docs.nvidia.com/vpi/sample_fisheye.html
Sponsored
Last edited:
