Airborne Near Infrared Three-Dimensional Ghost Imaging LiDAR via Sparsity Constraint

Chenglong Wang,Xiaodong Mei,Zunwang Bo,Pengwei Wang,Xin Gao,Wang Li,Long Pan,Mingliang Chen,Shensheng Han,Wenlin Gong

doi:10.3390/rs10050732

Abstract

Three-dimensional ghost imaging LiDAR via sparsity constraint (3D GISC LiDAR), as a staring imaging method, can obtain both the range information and spatial distribution of a remote target with a single-pixel time-resolved detector. However, previous demonstrations mainly focused on the relatively static scene in visible light. Here we propose an airborne near infrared 3D GISC LiDAR system and airborne high-resolution imaging is implemented. Experimental results show that an image with 0.48 m horizontal resolution as well as 0.5 m range resolution at approximately 1.04 km height can be achieved. Some considerations on the improvement of this LiDAR system are also discussed.

Highlights

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging can provide literal imagery interpreted at ranges beyond what passive two-dimensional (2D) monochromatic imaging can provide [1]
The LiDAR’s main body is firstly mounted on a stabilized platform and mounted on the airframe via a support frame. This LiDAR system mainly consists of a static near infrared (NIR) 3D ghost imaging via sparsity constraint (3D GISC) LiDAR subsystem (Figure 1a), which is similar to the system described in Ref. [11]) and a motion compensation subsystem (MCS, Figure 1b)
On the basis of the theory described in Ref. [19], in this case the maximum motion blur caused by axial range variation was 0.18 m, which could be negligible in contrast with the LiDAR system’s designed horizontal resolution 0.4 m

Summary

Introduction

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging can provide literal imagery interpreted at ranges beyond what passive two-dimensional (2D) monochromatic imaging can provide [1]. With only one time-resolved single-pixel detector, this method can obtain high-resolution 3D imagery by using measurements below the Nyquist limit [9,10,11]. This brand-new technique is a staring imaging mechanism and has the capability of both high efficiency in information extraction and high sensitivity in signal detection, which is developing into a new 3D imaging LiDAR [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. In 2012, our group invented a 2D GISC LiDAR system at 532 nm wavelength and high-resolution 2D imaging was experimentally demonstrated [10]

Methods

Results

Conclusion