Self-gating single-photon time-of-flight depth imaging with multiple repetition rates

Abstract

We demonstrate a self-gating single-photon imaging LiDAR with dual-repetition rate laser pulses at 1550 nm. In the experiment, two laser pulses with different repetition rates are used to enlarge the unambiguous range. A GHz-gated Geiger-mode InGaAs/InP single-photon detector is employed to detect high rate echo photons, and two galvanometer mirrors are used to realize laser beam scanning imaging. The self-gating denoising method is proposed to remove the randomly distributed noise in the three-dimensional point cloud, which increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the system from -1.72 to 5.91 dB. We attained a large range single-photon image with the valid point cloud generation rate of 1.3 × 105 points per second containing targets from 200 m to 1200 m, which is cutting-edge in the field of single-photon LiDAR. The clearly-reconstructed image indicates the self-gating single-photon imaging provides a promising approach for long-distance and high-speed single-photon imaging.