Doppler Laser Radar for Range and Speed Measurement of Road Objects with a Single Photon-detector

Range and speed measurement at the same time by vehicle laser radar is not commercially realized yet. A laser radar architecture which uses single photon-detector (PD) is proposed to measure both range and speed. For achieving the purpose, pulse position modulation technique is applied to modulate the transmitting waveform. At the receiving end, data integration is applied to the PD outputs for localizing the noise buried back signal. A non-uniform Fourier transform technique is then put forward for computing Doppler frequency of the PD outputs, which is generated by moving objects in roads. By these two steps, range and speed are obtained from the single PD outputs, and thus have advantages of higher stability and lower costs.