Obstacle detection is a key issue in many current applications, especially in applications that have been increasingly highlighted such as: advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and autonomous navigation system. This can be achieved by active and passive acquisition vision systems, for example: laser and cameras respectively. In this paper we present a comparison between low-cost active and passive devices, more specifically LIDAR and two cameras. To this comparison a disparity map is created by stereo correspondence through two images and a point cloud map created by LIDAR data values (distances measures). The obtained results shown that passive vision can be as good as or even better than active vision in low cost scenarios
