"In LIDAR (light detection and ranging) applications, single-photon sensitive detection is an emerging approach, offering high sensitivity to light and picosecond temporal resolution, and consequently excellent surface-to-surface resolution. The use of large format CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) single-photon detector arrays provides high spatial resolution and allows the timing information to be acquired simultaneously across many pixels. In this work, we combine state-of-the-art single-photon detector array technology with non-local data fusion to generate high resolution three-dimensional depth information of long-range targets. The system is based on a visible pulsed illumination system at a wavelength of 670 nm and a 240 × 320 array sensor, achieving sub-centimeter precision in all three spatial dimensions at a distance of 150 meters. The non-local data fusion combines information from an optical image with sparse sampling of the single-photon array data, providing accurate depth information at low signature regions of the target."
Would've been interesting to see the QE at 670 nm and what it would take to bring that back to IR. 670 nm isn't really attractive to most applications... I like that the paper details the setup to some extent. But without giving some more performance parameters such as QE it's not really reproducible.
ReplyDeleteAlso, quite a bulky setup...
Lastly, would be nice to actually see this bench marked. After all, this is not the first long distance LIDAR setup. In circuitry unless you present some really novel ideas, you don't get papers accepted in high-quality journals/conferences without a benchmark...