A laser area sensor according to an embodiment includes: a laser range finder (110) that obtains a distance to an object and a light-reception level of reflected light: a scanning mechanism (120) that changes the measurement direction; a data acquiring portion (130) that periodically performs measurement while changing the measurement direction; a data correcting portion (135) that removes distance information of a portion corresponding to a discontinuous change and corrects light-reception level information of a portion that does not correspond to the discontinuous change after the obtained distance information and light-reception level information are compared with distance information and light-reception level information of preceding and succeeding measurement periods in each direction; a human body judging portion (140) that extracts a portion that is presumed to correspond to a human body, from the corrected distance information, and judges whether or not the extracted portion matches a human body based on a time-series moving status of the extracted portion; and an alert output control portion (150) that outputs a human body detection signal.