10.5. Active 3D Sensors

Another way to find the depth of objects in an image is to use laser projection and an infrared sensor. This is how the Microsoft Kinect system works. This video from Peter Corke explains how Active 3D Sensors work.

Note that such strategies work well indoors, but not so well in direct sun light.

A LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system is similar, in that yields an “image” of distance locations, but it does not use an optical camera at all. LIDAR uses a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances).