Integrated optical sensors for 3-D vision

3-D vision systems are slowly entering the off the-shelf market due to their manifold potential applications. Market driven applications like reverse engineering, surveillance and automotive are pushing towards high volume production but require low system costs. Using recent advances in microelectronic and opto-electronic technologies and integrating when possible many processing functions at sensor level addresses this issue. Balanced integration of functionalities and developments of innovative measuring techniques will lead to system volume and cost reduction as required by many consumer applications. We present in this paper two examples of integrated optical sensors suitable to be used in 3-D measurement systems based on the optical triangulation and indirect time of flight techniques, respectively.