AEye: Developing Artificial Perception Technologies That Exceed Human Perception

Nothing can take in more information and process it faster and more accurately than the human visual cortex…until now. Humans classify complex objects at speeds up to 27Hz, with the brain processing 580 megapixels of data in as little as 13 milliseconds. While conventional LiDAR sensors on autonomous vehicles average around a 10Hz frame rate and revisit rate, iDAR sensors can achieve a frame rate in excess of 100Hz (>3x human vision), and an object revisit rate of >500Hz.

So what?

A single interrogation point rarely delivers sufficient confidence – it is only suggestive. That’s why LiDAR systems must capture multiple detects of the same object to fully comprehend it, making the speed of subsequent interrogations/detects (the object revisit rate) significantly more critical to autonomous vehicle safety than frame rate alone. For conventional LiDAR sensors, the object revisit rate is the frame rate.

AEye’s iDAR not only has the ability to revisit an object within a single frame, it can revisit multiple points/objects of interest. The achievable object revisit rate of AEye’s iDAR system for objects of interest is microseconds to a few milliseconds – which can be up to 3000x faster, compared to conventional LiDAR systems that typically require hundreds of milliseconds between revisits.

Reducing the time between object detections within the same frame is critical, as shorter object revisit times keep processing times low for advanced algorithms that correlate multiple moving objects in a scene.

“iDAR takes the guesswork out of artificial perception and replaces it with actionable data.” – Dr. Allan Steinhardt, AEye Chief Scientist