Light detector

1. A light detector comprising:

a light-receiving unit having a light-receiving element of a photon-counting type that receives incident light and outputs binary pulses, each of which indicates presence or absence of photon incidence;

an accumulating unit in which a total of pulse widths of the pulses is integrated or accumulatively summed over a measurement period;

a sampling unit that samples each of the plurality of pulses at an interval less than the pulse width of the respective pulse; and

a counting unit that counts a sampled value of the sampling unit over the measurement period, wherein the counted value denotes a total of pulse widths of the pulses,

wherein an output of the light detector is monotonic and lacks a value proportional to the amount of incident light received, and a correction unit corrects the output so as to be proportional to the amount of incident light received.

2. The light detector according to claim 1 , wherein

the light-receiving unit is of an array type in which a plurality of the light-receiving elements are arranged,

the light detector further comprises an adder unit that sums pulses which are output from the plurality of the light-receiving elements, and

the accumulating unit integrates or accumulatively sums an output of the adder unit over the measurement period.

3. The light detector according to claim 1 , wherein the light-receiving element includes an avalanche photodiode in a Geiger mode.

4. The light detector according to claim 2 , wherein the light-receiving element includes an avalanche photodiode in a Geiger mode.

5. The light detector according to claim 1 , wherein the correction unit surveys a predetermined correlation relationship between the amount of incident light received and the output of the light detector.

6. The light detector according to claim 5 , wherein the correction unit uses a lookup table to survey the predetermined relationship.