Histogram generating circuit, optical rangefinder, histogram generation method, and optical ranging method

Abstract

A histogram generating circuit generates a histogram based on respective flight information that is a time of flight or a flight distance from an emission time point of measurement light repeatedly emitted at predetermined periods to a detection time point of reflected light for respective measurement light, the histogram showing a cumulative frequency of the flight information distributed in a preset measurement range, the histogram generating circuit including: a memory circuit configured to store the histogram; and a memory processing circuit configured to associate a bin number for identifying each bin obtained by splitting the measurement range into a plurality of divisions individually in order based on the flight information with the flight information contained in each bin and the cumulative frequency, and store them in the memory circuit, thereby effectively using a limited memory area.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.