Percepting the environment around an autonomous vehicle (AV) is essential before path planning and control of the AV. There are four main sensors used for this task in AVs: Lidar, Radar, Vision and Sonar. Although there has been a debate of the sensor suite needed among the companies working on the self-driving car technology especially Lidar and Radar; but they all agree on one sensor that is vision sensor or camera.
Camera Working Principle
Cameras work on the basic principle of landing the light emitted from the objects on a photosensitive surface through a lens. The photosensitive surface also called the image plane is where the light is stored as an image. After a light passes through the lens, the light sensitive surface converts those rays into electrons, those electrons are then converted to voltage, amplified, passed through an Analog-Digital Converter (ADC) and converted to a number in a metric unit or pixels.