Denso Corporation

Mineki Soga

Hiroyuki Matsubara

Noriyuki Ozaki

Isamu Takai

Teiyu Kimura

Takehiro Hata

An optical distance measuring apparatus comprises a laser diode emitting a light pulse, light receiver including a photon-counting light receiver, distance measurement unit including a signal discriminator and propagation estimator, and threshold determiner. The signal discriminator discriminates the signal component, exceeding a threshold, of the signal as a reflected signal resulting from reflection of the light pulse at a measurement object. The propagation estimator estimates a round-trip propagation time of the light pulse to the measurement object using the signal. The threshold determiner sets a boundary level as the threshold, corresponding to a reference level obtained from the signal when the signal discriminator determines the reflected signal, using the relationship between the reference and the boundary level. The reference level is obtained from the average value of a noise probability distribution in the signal. The boundary level represents a predetermined cumulative probability in the noise probability distribution.

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Nagakute, Japan

Mineki Soga