System and method for sensing geometric and photometric attributes of a scene with multiplexed illumination and solid states optical devices

An apparatus arranged at a location in a scene, comprising:

• a photo sensor arranged at the location in the scene and configured to detect spatio-temporal modulated optical signals directed at the scene from a set of spatially dispersed optical transmitters, and to convert the optical signals from each of the optical transmitters to a corresponding electronic signal, wherein an encoding of the spatio-temporal modulated signals exploit an epipolar geometric relationship between the spatially dispersed optical transmitters and the photo sensor, and wherein the photo sensor is a single photo diode;
• and wherein a passive binary mask in front of each of the optical transmitters encodes the spatio-temporal modulated optical signals;
• and
• a means, connected to the photo sensor, for analyzing values of the electronic signals to determine geometric properties of the location in the scene.