Fast surface signal extraction method for photon point clouds with strong background noise without prior altitude information.

Abstract

It is extremely challenging to rapidly and accurately extract target echo photon signals from massive photon point clouds with strong background noise without any prior geographic information. Herein, we propose a fast surface detection method realized by combining the improved density-dimension algorithm (DDA) and Kalman filtering (KF), termed the DDA-KF algorithm, for photon signals with a high background noise rate (BNR) to improve the extraction of surface photon signals from spacecraft platforms. The results showed that the algorithm exhibited good adaptability to strong background noise and terrain slope variations, and had real-time processing capabilities for massive photon point clouds in large-scale detection range without prior altitude information of target. Our research provides a practical technical solution for single-photon lidar applications in deep space navigation and can help improve the performance in environments characterized by strong background noise.