Abstract
Photon-counting laser ranging has attracted a lot of research interest for its application in the altimeter. In this letter, we report a large scale multi-beam photon-counting laser imaging system by using 100 laser beams in linear array as the light source. Taking advantage of a 100-channel low-noise high-efficiency single-photon detector, the three-dimensional image of remote targets could be constructed rapidly according to the time-of-flight measurement. This system provides a solution for a high-speed, high-resolution, low energy-consumption pushbroom airborne or spaceborne laser altimeter.
Highlights
Remote laser detection and ranging shows considerable significance with applications in geography, forestry, atmospheric physics due to the advantages of small volume and high precision [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Photon-counting laser ranging has attracted a lot of research interest for its application in the altimeter
We report a large scale multi-beam photon-counting laser imaging system by using 100 laser beams in linear array as the light source
Summary
Remote laser detection and ranging (lidar) shows considerable significance with applications in geography, forestry, atmospheric physics due to the advantages of small volume and high precision [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The three-dimensional (3D) topographic imaging was constructed by combining the swath mapping technique with a multi-laser-beam linear array and a photon-counting detector array of 1000 pixels. The 100-channel single-photon detector based on Si-APDs provides high detection efficiency, low noise, short time jitter and no cross talk, paving the way to a high-resolution lidar system with low energy consumption. By slightly adjusting the focal length of the camera lens, we could obtain a distance between two adjacent beam spots as 127 μm at the focus to match the multi-mode fiber array. The outputs of the single-photon detectors and the synchronization signal of the laser source were recorded by a 100-channel time-to-digital converter (TDC) which was formed of seven field programmable gate array (FPGA) boards. Since the 100 single-photon counting modules operated independently, there was no cross talk noise between different channels, reducing the error counts in the acquisition
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