A process for the optical detection of objects moved at a conveying speed. The process comprises illuminating the object in a temporally consecutive manner with a sequence of at least two light pulses of different colors and taking images of the object during each light pulse with a monochromatic optical area sensor comprising many sensor lines. The process comprises reading out and temporarily storing at least as many lines of each image as there are different colors of the light pulses. The read-out lines have a line pitch relative to each other. Sequentially combining lines from images taken under illumination by different colors to form color lines, with the lines combined with each other having the aforesaid line pitch or a multiple thereof relative to each other when they are being read out, and assembling the color lines into an overall color picture.