Slashdot Mirror
Man Says CES Lidar's Laser Was So Powerful It Wrecked His Camera (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A man attending this week's CES show in Las Vegas says that a lidar sensor from startup AEye has permanently damaged the sensor on his $1,998 Sony camera. Earlier this week, roboticist and entrepreneur Jit Ray Chowdhury snapped photos of a car at CES with AEye's lidar units on top. He discovered that every subsequent picture he took was marred by two bright purple spots, with horizontal and vertical lines emanating from them. "I noticed that all my pictures were having that spot," he told Ars by phone on Thursday evening. "I covered up the camera with the lens cap and the spots are there -- it's burned into the sensor." In an email to Ars Technica, AEye CEO Luis Dussan confirmed that AEye's lidars can cause damage to camera sensors -- though he stressed that they pose no danger to human eyes. "Cameras are up to 1000x more sensitive to lasers than eyeballs," Dussan wrote. "Occasionally, this can cause thermal damage to a camera's focal plane array." Chowdhury says that AEye has offered to buy him a new camera. The potential issue is that self-driving cars also rely on conventional cameras. "So if those lidars are not camera-safe, it won't just create a headache for people snapping pictures with handheld camera," reports Ars. "Lidar sensors could also damage the cameras on other self-driving cars."
"It's worth noting that companies like Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise have been testing dozens of vehicles with lidar on public streets for more than a year," adds Ars. "People have taken many pictures of these cars, and as far as we know none of them have suffered camera damage. So most lidars being tested in public today do not seem to pose a significant risk to cameras."
"It's worth noting that companies like Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise have been testing dozens of vehicles with lidar on public streets for more than a year," adds Ars. "People have taken many pictures of these cars, and as far as we know none of them have suffered camera damage. So most lidars being tested in public today do not seem to pose a significant risk to cameras."
"Cameras are up to 1000x more sensitive to lasers than eyeballs"
and what was the shutter speed he was using? Something like one 1/500th of a second, so in 1 second the laser would do 500 times the damage it did to the camera? in 2 seconds it'd do just as much damage.
If this is powerful enough to damage a CMOS/CCD sensor then it is most certainly also doing damage to biological tissue in eyeballs.
If this is doing "thermal damage" to CMOS/CCDs, essentially chunks of glass, then it is doing more damage to biological tissues.
Cool! I wonder if a powerful IR laser would also zorch speed cameras and/or surveillance cameras.
"People have taken many pictures of these cars, and as far as we know none of them have suffered camera damage. So most lidars being tested in public today do not seem to pose a significant risk to cameras."
Or maybe, just maybe, this was one of the few instances where (1) camera damage happened; (2) the camera owner realized the damage must have been due to snapping a picture of a self-driving car; and (3) the camera owner knew who owned the self-driving car so they could complain?
A camera should withstand being pointed at the sun. If something puts out more power and damages a camera, shame (and liability) on them.
Broadcasting light interference is no different than broadcasting radio interference (in terms of responsibility, not physics).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When I use multiple LIDARs on a machine their beam sweep has to be synchronised otherwise the reflections of one beam can interfere with the other.
I'm waiting to see what happens with a freeway full of cars with LIDARs, all flinging their beams at each other willy-nilly with direct beams and reflections all over the place. If you're unlucky you'll get a beam from another vehicle just after yours has sent a pulse out - resulting in a false return showing something right in front of you.
I'm guessing that most of the time with enough units around you all you'd get is the equivalent of "static" on your laser sweeps, where you briefly get invalid results for a few degrees of sweep. If you're really unlucky, you blind your sensor, temporarily (bad), or permanently damage it (bad and expensive).
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
You should have brought your LIDAR blocking sunglasses. You now have retina damage for life.
All I hear is that there will now be some "smart" people trying to outsmart new tech and cameras by firing lasers, not strong enough to poke your eyes out, but strong enough to burn the retina of the machine.
--
When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things. - Joe Namath
We need to develop passive sensors. I mean, we have them, we're just not using them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As the original article duly explains, the laser light at the wavelength of 1550 nm used by this lidar scanner does NOT reach the retina of the eye. At this wavelength, it is fully absorbed in outer parts of the eye (cornea, lens, etc.) before it could get focused into a tight spot on the retina. This makes this wavelength (relatively) eye-safe, comparing to visible and some other wavelength ranges. There is no such protection for the camera however, whose glass optics happily focuses 1550 nm into a small spot... so the sensor damage may happen.
Laser safety regulations are primarily concerned with (a) no damage to humans, especially their eyes, and (b) laser beams not setting things on fire. Neither of this has happened in this incident. So we are good.
If you are interested in technical details of laser safety, read ANSI Z136.1 standard. Warning: it requires technical expertise.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Go away fatass
Seems like Elon was right when he decided to use RADAR, cameras, image processing and AI, rather than LIDAR on Tesla cars
Bwa ha ha ha ha!!
Why use expensive Lidar when stereo vision will also provide good depth perception. Two cameras pointing in the same direction. Line up the dots and do the Trig.
That is a genuine question. I wonder why the focus on Lidar.
So, how long will the various municipalities' automatic red light ticketing cameras last with this?
The camera in question is a Sony A7rII, which is a mirrorless camera. Such cameras constantly expose the sensor to light in the scene [while not taking photos], which is necessary to provide the video-like image stream used for the electronic viewfinder and LCD display.
As someone who has aimed a laser at a CMOS sensor for hours at a time, I would want to check to make sure the laser might be over the legal limit. Laser Shined at CMOS sensor, for hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I have seen videos of laser strikes ruin sensor, but often at laser light shows, which might also be over the legal limit.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Manufacturer designs camera-killing laser to be mounted on the front of vehicles which have cameras on their rears. What could possibly go wrong?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So now we have cars weaponized with high energy electromagnetic weapons. Great for attacking other "intelligent cars". Only the strongest will rule the roads.
So, yeah, claming they're "sensitive" CCD pixels just goes to show you really only care about sticking it to CES, not about reality.
Sony does not have a good security track record so this does not come as a surprise to me.
OWASP Secure Coding Practices Checklist section 1 about input validation was clearly not applied at all. Specifically, they failed to implement "Validate data range" :p
0x or or snor perron?!
Ever see the sun in it? then it's being pointed at the sun. The entire sensitive area is equally sensitive on a CCD, it's the human eyeball that has the central area covered with colour receptors whose robustness can be damaged by sunlight. Why do you think looking straight at the sun is bad while having it in the field of view isn't?
CCD cameras don't have an area that is different from the rest.
Human eyes do.
But I see why there's so much arsewiping on reality going on here: it's self driving cars, therefore satan's plan, therefore it MUST BE EVIL. Don't care if it's valid, do you, as long as self driving cars are killed, that's all you care about.
Just saying...
Because all the cool kids in the schools working the problem (Stanford, CMU) have large enough development budgets to use LIDAR which is available off the shelf as a box with a computer interface. Gives you a great point cloud and lots of data.
It's a natural outgrowth of the vision/video processing - they've already got years of software for processing 2d and stereo pairs, building world models, etc.
Radar isn't like this - nobody sells a "radar camera" with a USB or Ethernet (or any) interface.
Ultimately it comes down to this: you do your research in an area where you're likely to be able publish papers - there's a lot more activity in the vision based and LIDAR area.
So Why LIDAR - it's easier for grad students to get experience.
Well that could be one way to end the red light camera money making scam from city's. "Officer that red dot is not me"
(.)-(.)
Also, what effect would that LIDAR have on surveillance cameras? I assume they could be fitted with filters, provided their IR operations are not affected.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"Do not look into LASER with remaining eye / camera."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
at Burning Man a few years back.
They have a ban on personal lasers and a moratorium on vehicle mounted lasers without a serious inspection (and with limited operating times) as a result of a pair of debilitating laser injuries to the same person while on bouncer duty during the burning of the man (they have security personnel to keep people from running into the blaze.) One was a personal laser pointer and the other was a miscalibrated laser display on a mutant vehicle.
Long story short, she lost her job, is legally blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, can barely drive, and has no real career options now.
That is how dangerous lasers are.
More subtle than throwing a burning tyre on them?