Adaptive depth imaging method based on photon counting LIDAR

For an unknown characteristic target scene, the laser radar system that uses single-photon detector cannot directly estimate the dwell time of every pixel. Therefore, as the difference of target reflectivity, depth estimation appears inadequate sampling or redundant sampling in the conventional imaging method of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE-CIM). In this work, an adaptive depth imaging method (ADIM) is presented. ADIM is capable to obtain the depth estimation of target and adaptively decide the dwell time of each pixel. The experimental results reveal that ADIM can accurately obtain the 3D depth image of target even at the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio.