Investigation of different target's micro‐vibration feature based on a coherent shot‐noise limited LIDAR

Abstract

Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) has facilitated extraordinary advances in various areas such as remote-sensing, topography, atmospheric/ecological environment studies etc. Benefiting from the much higher carrier frequency than Radar, LIDARs are extremely Doppler-sensitive, making them quite capable for micro-vibration and precise velocity measurements. Here, the authors investigate the micro-vibration feature of different targets through a coherent CW LIDAR whose noise performance is dominated by the shot-noise of light. The complexity of the micro-vibration feature observed in the one-dimensional velocity spectrum raises challenge to the matched filtering process for range detection, while on the other hand may offer extra characteristics for target classification and recognition.