There is some precedent for this. Precise digital surface models are useful in geomorphological studies, and the state of the art for producing a new one in the field is laser scanning. But earlier this decade, researchers started using differential processing of sequential images taken from a platform moving arbitrarily (plane, helicopter, drone, etc.) and were able to produce DSMs with elevation resolutions below 10cm, which is sufficient for a lot of studies. See this paper on "structure from motion":
The big difference between this and driving is that in SfM, the platform moves arbitrarily around the feature of interest until it has enough data to build the model. Driving is far more linear; your car can't circle an unknown object 5 times until it understands what it is. So, it might be more important for driving applications to maximize the number of different channels of sensor data available to integrate for creating a model.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X1...
The big difference between this and driving is that in SfM, the platform moves arbitrarily around the feature of interest until it has enough data to build the model. Driving is far more linear; your car can't circle an unknown object 5 times until it understands what it is. So, it might be more important for driving applications to maximize the number of different channels of sensor data available to integrate for creating a model.