Ambient Light Rejection in SPAD-based LiDAR

MDPI Special Issue The International SPAD Sensor Workshop publishes "Background Light Rejection in SPAD-Based LiDAR Sensors by Adaptive Photon Coincidence Detection" paper by Maik Beer, Jan F. Haase, Jennifer Ruskowski, and Rainer Kokozinski from Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems, Duisburg, and University Duisburg-Essen.

"In this paper we present a novel method based on the adaptive adjustment of photon coincidence detection to suppress the background light and simultaneously improve the dynamic range. A major disadvantage of fixed parameter coincidence detection is the increased dynamic range of the resulting event rate, allowing good measurement performance only at a specific target reflectance. To overcome this limitation we have implemented adaptive photon coincidence detection. In this technique the parameters of the photon coincidence detection are adjusted to the actual measured background light intensity, giving a reduction of the event rate dynamic range and allowing the perception of high dynamic scenes. We present a 192 × 2 pixel CMOS SPAD-based LiDAR sensor utilizing this technique and accompanying outdoor measurements showing the capability of it. In this sensor adaptive photon coincidence detection improves the dynamic range of the measureable target reflectance by over 40 dB."