Generalized comparison of the accessible emission limits of flash- and scanning LiDAR- systems

In the field of autonomous driving and human-robot collaboration applications the demand for three-dimensional imaging systems, that are reliable, small and low-cost, is rising. A promising technology to satisfy these demands are scanning or flash-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-systems, which differ mainly in the illumination of the field-of-view. A scanning LiDAR-system illuminates the field-of-view sequentially by deflecting a laser beam. In a flash LiDAR-system the laser beam is extended to illuminate the whole field-of-view with every emitted laser pulse. Both illumination principles are extensively treated in the recent literature separately and without the inclusion of the limits defined by the laser safety standard IEC 60825-1:2014. In this work a generalized model is derived from the standard. This model is able to determine the emission limits of the standard for both LiDAR-systems at the same time and it is used to compare the maximum output power and the intensities in the field-of-view for both LiDAR-systems.