Self-homodyne coherent Lidar system for range and velocity detection

Abstract

A high resolution FMCW Lidar system based on a phase-diverse self-homodyne coherent receiver is demonstrated. Using the same linearly chirped waveform for both the transmitted lidar signal and the local oscillator, the self-homodyne coherent receiver performs frequency de-chirping in the photodiodes which significantly simplifies the task of signal processing, and the required receiver bandwidth can be much lower than the signal chirping bandwidth. While only amplitude modulation is required in the lidar transmitter, phase-diverse coherent receiver allows simultaneous detection of target range and velocity through the spectrum of the de-chirped complex waveform. Multi-target detection is also demonstrated experimentally.