A system and method for providing a dynamic region of interest in a lidar system can include scanning a light beam over a field of view to capture a first lidar image, identifying a first object within the captured first lidar image, selecting a first region of interest within the field of view that contains at least a portion of the identified first object, and capturing a second lidar image, where capturing the second lidar image includes scanning the light beam over the first region of interest at a first spatial sampling resolution, and scanning the light beam over the field of view outside of the first region of interest at a second spatial sampling resolution, wherein the second sampling resolution is different the first spatial sampling resolution.