A fusion imaging system with visible light camera and photon counting lidar

Abstract

Photon counting lidar is a high-sensitivity laser active imaging method. It can obtain more three-dimensional point cloud data under the same size, weight and power consumption. Through the use of photon counting lidar and image fusion process, the electro-optical system, such as visible light and infrared camera, could generate grayscale images and videos with distance, position and other information of the targets. In this paper, a Fusion Imaging System with Visible Light Camera and Photon Counting Lidar was designed. Visible light image and high-resolution photon counting threedimensional point clouds could be obtained by the system. Fiber array coupled Geiger-APDs were used as the single photon detectors in the system to acquire three-dimensional information with two-dimensional scanner. A CMOS camera was used to acquire gray visible light image in the system. The time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) filter algorithm was used to process the single photon points in order to filter the noise signals and extract valid signals. The fusion processing algorithm of the imaging system was designed by using the direct linear transformation algorithm. The performance of the system was verified through experiments. The results show that the three-dimensional imaging range exceeds 1000m under the day light condition. The ranging accuracy of the system is 0.083m. Pixel-level fusion of visible light image and three-dimensional image could be realized at 1024×768 resolution, which effectively improves the detection and recognition capabilities of the system.