Laboratory Measurements of the Performance of a Poly Pulse Pair Signal Processor

Abstract

A signal processor has been developed to perform estimations of the parameters associated with the signal return from a coherent CO2 pulsed Doppler lidar. The processor is based on a variation of the pulse pair technique utilized in conventional Doppler radar signal processing. The variation, termed poly-pulse pair processing, was developed in an attempt to provide an optimized method of estimating the mean frequency, intensity and spectral width associated with the lidar return signal. In order to ascertain the performance of the processor, a test program was undertaken in which simulated lidar returns of known spectral characteristics were input and the signal processor output was evaluated as a function of input signal to noise ratio. These results were then compared to the signal processor performance using actual lidar signals from hard targets and clear air.