Compressive sensing based three-dimensional imaging method with electro-optic modulation for nonscanning laser radar

Low-cost Laser Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is crucial to three-dimensional (3D) imaging in applications such as remote sensing, target detection, and machine vision. In conventional nonscanning time-of-flight (TOF) LiDAR, the intensity map is obtained by a detector array and the depth map is measured in the time domain which requires costly sensors and short laser pulses. To overcome such limitations, this paper presents a nonscanning 3D laser imaging method that combines compressive sensing (CS) techniques and electro-optic modulation. In this novel scheme, electro-optic modulation is applied to map the range information into the intensity of echo pulses symmetrically and the measurements of pattern projection with symmetrical structure are received by the low bandwidth detector. The 3D imaging can be extracted from two gain modulated images that are recovered by solving underdetermined inverse problems. An integrated regularization model is proposed for the recovery problems and the minimization functional model is solved by a proposed algorithm applying the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) technique. The simulation results on various subrates for 3D imaging indicate that our proposed method is feasible and achieves performance improvement over conventional methods in systems with hardware limitations. This novel method will be highly valuable for practical applications with advantages of low cost and flexible structure at wavelengths beyond visible spectrum.