Patent ID: 8064046

Claim:
A method for determining a distance from an object, comprising: emitting an emission light beam from a light emitter; receiving a reception light beam at a light receiver, wherein the reception light beam arises as a result of reflection of the emission light beam at the object; and determining the distance on the basis of a propagation time of the emission and reception light beams; wherein the emission light beam is amplitude-modulated with a rectangular-waveform modulation signal; wherein the modulation signal has a multiplicity of rectangular pulses which occur in a multiplicity of groups; and wherein the groups occur at varying temporal intervals with respect to one another and have changing numbers of rectangular pulses, wherein the rectangular-waveform modulation signal is generated as a binary rectangular-waveform modulation signal via a digital circuit, wherein at least one of a computational specification of values and a table of values, which represents three modulation signals, is stored in the digital circuit, and by which the digital circuit generates the binary pulse sequence that is fed as the binary rectangular-waveform modulation signal to the light emitter.