High-resolution single-photon imaging by trajectory compensation scanning

A high-speed single-photon LiDAR (light detection and ranging) has been reported, which incorporates a novel trajectory compensation scanning method. This innovative approach significantly improves the airborne LiDAR's ability to reconstruct targets compared to traditional scanning methods by adding a scan parallel to the flight direction with an amplitude close to the inter-row space. The simulation indicates that the trajectory compensation scanning method increased the area illuminated by the laser footprint by 70% compared to the traditional ‘Z’ pattern scanning. It overcomes the issue of uneven distribution of sampling points that arises from high-speed movement of the aircraft or insufficient scan frequency. The imaging results of targets 17 m away strongly support that this approach can improve the resolution for airborne single-photon LiDARs.