Event-based Scheimpflug LiDAR for ultra-fast laser-scanned rangefinding.

Current optical rangefinding exhibits an unfavorable trade-off in sensor selection, where traditional frame-based cameras are constrained by frame rate and provide no intrinsic mechanism for background rejection, while event-based active ranging systems recover speed only through steered illumination and computationally intensive reconstruction. To fill this gap, we present eSCHORTY, a Scheimpflug LiDAR that integrates an event-based sensor with a modulated continuous-wave line laser to enable dense 3D point cloud generation at event-camera throughput rates through a geometry-driven encoding scheme that uses a tilted sensor for snapshot ranging with a calibrated pixel-to-range mapping and no inverse reconstruction. Within the experimental conditions tested, the system is demonstrated to generate filtered point clouds at event rates up to one million events per second, with upward performance limited only by the raw event generation rate. We show that laser intensity modulation introduces a tunable trade-off between event-space feature detectability and spatial localization, and that logarithmic event encoding reduces the reflectance-induced centroid bias previously observed in intensity-based ranging. Reconstructions of natural scenes demonstrate qualitative recovery of complex scenes, while controlled targets are used to quantitatively characterize the ranging geometry and calibrate system model parameters. Although the present prototype is demonstrated over a limited stand-off range, the underlying Scheimpflug architecture is broadly reconfigurable, and practical considerations for longer distances are discussed.