Comment by tsimionescu
5 hours ago
No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions.
Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.
I don't think they meant literally cameras only can create reliable distance measures. At the risk of putting words in their mouth, I would guess they meant "cameras as the only input to a distance model". the "model" doing all the heavy lifting, covering the points that you quite rightly point out are needed
Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation