Pulse-shape-free method for long-range three-dimensional active imaging with high linear accuracy

Abstract

We present a three-dimensional (3D) imaging method employing linear increasing gain to encode flying time of photons into intensity information. This method obtains both the reflectivity and the depth of scene from only two two-dimensional (2D) images. High linear accuracy between the depth and the intensity information is independent of the laser pulse shape. We demonstrated <1 m linear depth accuracies with two different kinds of laser pulse shape and a 3D scene reconstruction with supperresolution depth mapping when the targets are 800-1100 m away.