New method of echo detection for diffuse reflection laser ranging

The echo received from diffuse reflection laser ranging (DRLR) system for space debris and satellite without corner reflector is too weak to detect available echo-photon robustly. A new method based on image saliency feature for echophoton detection was proposed, which used the concept of image saliency in computer vision field to describe echophoton distribution feature. The O-C residue distribution information was used to generate O-C residue image, and then saliency feature recognition, Piecewise Hough detection and polynomial fitting were adopt orderly to obtain available echo signal. The actual experiment results show the effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm.