Beamforming receiver for underwater pulsed laser line scanning

Our current research adds another layer of enhancement over Pulsed Laser Line Scanning (PLLS) by partially rejecting the source-to-target forward scattering effects. The technique uses the same source as PLLS system, but the receiver consists of a linear array of n time-resolved bucket collectors in the cross-axis direction. The spacing between receive elements is large enough to cause measurable time-of-flight differences in the near-field. By using a near-field beamforming algorithm, which sums together the time-resolved receiver waveforms with the appropriate delays based on the geometry, the contrast ratio is improved and some of the multiple forward scattering induced blur/glow/ghosting effects are rejected as well as improving the time-of-flight based 3D image reconstruction. This paper utilizes modeling to investigate the feasibility of this method.