Patent ID: 7924409

Claim:
A rangefinder comprising: a lens system including a number of lenses, which are arranged so that their optical axes are parallel to each other and which are integrated together; an imager, which has a number of image capturing areas that face the respective lenses and which transforms light that has been incident on the image capturing areas into an electrical signal; a light-transmitting flat plate, which is arranged between the imager and the lens system and which has substantially the same thermal expansion coefficient as the lenses; a number of markers, which are provided on the light-transmitting flat plate for the respective lenses and each of which casts its shadow on an associated one of the image capturing areas; a signal receiving section, which receives the electrical signal from the imager, thereby generating a plurality of image signals representing images that have been produced in the respective image capturing areas; and an image processing section, which receives the image signals, corrects the positions of the optical axes of the lenses by reference to information about the locations of the markers' shadows on the respective images, and determines the distance to an object by performing a triangulation based on the corrected positions of the optical axes.