Photon Counting Laser 3 D Imaging System Design And Implementation

Compared to Radar using micro or millimeter wave, Laser Radar(Ladar) has many merits such as higher resolution in angle and range with narrower diffusion width. So it is widely used in civil and military fields and will have a great development in the future. The Ladar using time-corrolated single photon counting(TCSPC) technique regarded as an important method for next generation ladar has a even better performace in timing accuracy, detection efficiency and eye-safe with lower laser power.TCSPC is a measurement technique that combines high detection sensitivity with picosecond timing resolution and has applications in, for ex-ample, time-resolved photoluminescence and quan-tum key distribution.In time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC), every detection event can be treated as an independent measurement of time. By many cycles of time-of-flight measurements a high value of range precision superior than system’s single-shot timing uncertainty can be aquired with suitable peak finding algorithm.This paper introduces a design of a three dimentional imaging ladar system using TCSPC technique based on the analysis of the principle of TCSPC ladar and performace of its key components. Based on this desige a TCSPC ladar system has been built for experiment. Several tests have been done to show the performance of three-dementional imaging. The result of the experiments shows that three-dimentinal imaging with depth uncertainty of several millimeter at50m was achieved with our system.First, the different types of ladar systems are introduced in this paper.A deep analysis for TCSPC ladar system is made with each key components. The performance of our system is also studied by simulation and experiment. At last, a range error correction method is produced for time walk error with software.