Artifact Removal in Long-Range Single Photon LiDAR via Waveforms-Guided Depth Image Estimation

Abstract

Single-photon light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has widespread applications due to the ultra-high sensitivity of the single-photon detector. However, the reconstruction has been plagued by multiple types of noise caused by crosstalk, dark counts, and background light. Artifacts produced by crosstalk are particularly difficult to distinguish directly from the signal for single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array detector. This work proposes a waveforms-guided depth image estimation method to remove the signal artifacts effectively. Experiments show that a region of interest recognition ratio of 1.02 is achieved at 4.2 km. The study demonstrates that this waveform-guided method has excellent potential for accurate target recognition in a long range.