An Overlapping and Leading Edge Detection Combined Technique for Distance Estimation under High-Background Lights in a Pulsed-LiDAR System

Abstract

In this paper, we implemented a direct Time of Flight (ToF) method to calculate the distance of a pulsed-LiDAR in high background lights on a Red Pitaya platform. In this proposed system, we utilized the Red Pitaya Kit to simulate the generation of LiDAR pulses. Another Kit used to capture, process data, and estimate the distance. Signals are acquired, including high-intensity background noise because LiDARs are requested to work in worse environments like sunlight, electric light, fog, etc. To overcome this problem, we proposed an Overlapping-edge (OE) technique to be combined with the Leading-edge (LE) method to detect pulses in noisy environments. Moreover, the sampling rate of the ADC in this platform was limited to 125Msps. Therefore, we performed an interpolation algorithm, namely Center of Mass (CoM), to increase the accuracy of the estimated distance. The experiment was performed on simulated signals with a signal-to-noise ratio of -8.5dB. The obtained result showed that the average success rate of measurements increased 7.56% compared with the Leading-edge method and the average accuracy reached nearly 7.1cm. In conclusion, we have built a high noise Pulse-LiDAR source and calculate distance on a Red Pitaya platform with a low cost and highly stable accuracy. The performance of a LiDAR system was also evaluated in this study.