Histogram-based Defogging Techniques for LiDAR

It is well known that the performance of LiDAR degrades severely in adverse weather conditions of which fog is considered one of the worst. In this paper the Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) LiDAR is studied, and techniques to mitigate fog effects are presented. Two approaches that are based on discerning the morphologies of target and fog peaks in histograms are presented with the emphasis on their capacities and limitations. In addition, future development of defogging technique based on processing point clouds is also presented. In general, histogram-based approaches have better performance but also have higher data storage and transportation requirements; while point-cloud-processing approaches may be able to achieve better trade-off.