Laser Velocimetry Based on Single-Photon Array Camera

A laser velocimetry method based on a single-photon array camera is proposed here. This approach can measure the lateral and radial velocity of a target simultenously under the single- photon echo intensity. A set of indoor array velocimetry lidar system is built to confirm the feasibility of array time-correlated single-photon counting technology for lateral and radial velocity measurement of moving targets. Background noise from the space and time dimensions is removed using signal preprocessing. The target's time- varying three-dimensional spatial coordinate is identified through centroid and peak detection and the target's lateral and radial velocity values are estimated using the least square method's linear fitting of the data. The result demonstrates that the frame accumulation number is associated with the best speed measurement performance. This method can measure the velocity of long-distance moving targets in poor light condition, and it is also expected to obtain a target velocity image in the future, giving technical support for the identification of longdistance complex moving targets.