Patent ID: 7760336

Claim:
A laser area sensor, comprising: a first laser range finder that emits pulsed laser light, measures a period of time for light reflected by at least one object that is present in a laser light emitting direction to return thereby to obtain distance information to the object and light-reception level information of the reflected light; a scanning mechanism portion that changes a measurement direction of the first laser range finder; an information acquiring portion that defines a detection area and acquires distance information and light-reception level information in each measurement direction in the detection area in a time-series manner, by the first laser range finder periodically performing measurement while the scanning mechanism portion changes the measurement direction; a first information correcting portion that, if there is a discontinuous change exceeding a predetermined amount when the distance information and light-reception level information acquired by the information acquiring portion in each measurement direction are compared with distance information and light-reception level information of preceding and succeeding measurement periods of the measurement period, removes distance information corresponding to the discontinuous change in the measurement period in the measurement direction and corrects light-reception level information of a portion that does not correspond to the discontinuous change; a human body judging portion that extracts a portion that is presumed to correspond to a human body, from the distance information corrected by the first information correcting portion, and judges whether or not the extracted portion matches a human body based on a time-series moving status of the extracted portion; and a human body detection signal output portion that outputs a human body detection signal if the human body judging portion judges that a human body is present.