Single-photon Lidar for canopy detection with a multi-channel Si SPAD at 1064 nm

We reported a miniaturized near-infrared single-photon Lidar at 1064 nm, in which a fiber-coupled Si-APD single-photon detector array with 6 elements was applied to detect the reflected photons simultaneously. By utilizing the multi-channel single-photon detector for the echo photons detection, the equivalent deadtime of the Lidar could be considerably decreased from 56 ns to 9.5 ns and the effective point cloud rate was improved from 2.48 × 10⁴ to 1.51 × 10⁵ points per second, both of which were about 6 times optimized than the single-channel detector system. The Lidar exhibits the striking multi-layer imaging capability to obtain a dense point cloud image of the multi-layer targets and restore its spatial structure, which is very attractive for the airborne altimeter imaging vegetation.