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US 9,431,439 B2Granted
Light detector
AssigneeKabushiki Kaisha Toyota Chuo Kenkyusho
InventorsMineki Soga, Cristiano Niclass
Life of this patent
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Abstract
There is provided a light detector having a light-receiving unit including a light-receiving element of a photon-counting type that receives incident light and outputs a binary pulse indicating presence or absence of photon incidence, and an integrating unit that calculates an output value in which a total of pulse widths of pulses is integrated over a measurement period.
Claims6
A light detector comprising:
- a light-receiving unit having a light-receiving element of a photon-counting type that receives incident light and outputs binary pulses, each of which indicates presence or absence of photon incidence;
- an accumulating unit in which a total of pulse widths of the pulses is integrated or accumulatively summed over a measurement period;
- a sampling unit that samples each of the plurality of pulses at an interval less than the pulse width of the respective pulse;
- and
- a counting unit that counts a sampled value of the sampling unit over the measurement period, wherein the counted value denotes a total of pulse widths of the pulses,
- wherein an output of the light detector is monotonic and lacks a value proportional to the amount of incident light received, and a correction unit corrects the output so as to be proportional to the amount of incident light received.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.