Abstract: An optoelectronic sensor (10) for detecting distance measurement data of objects in a monitored area (20), the optoelectronic sensor (10) comprising a measuring unit having a light transmitter (12) for transmitting transmitted light (16) at a plurality of angles and a light receiver (26) for generating a received signal, and a control and evaluation unit (36) configured to acquire the distance measurement data from the received signal with an angular resolution and a time resolution over the plurality of angles and a plurality of measurement repetitions, to arrange the distance measurement data into an image (46) of pixels representing distance values arranged over a dimension of an angle and a dimension of time, and to evaluate the image (46) using a machine learning image classification method (48) in order to assign a class to the pixels.