Measurement of vehicles speed with full waveform lidar

Measurement of vehicles speed by means of displacement measurement with "time of flight" lidar requires gathering of accurate information about distance to the vehicle in a set time interval. As with any pulsed laser lidar, its maximum range is limited by available incoming signal to noise ratio. That ratio determines not only maximum range, but also accuracy of measurement. For fast and precise measurements of speed of the vehicles their displacement should bee measured with centimeter accuracy. However that demand is hard to reach on long distances and poor quality of the echo signal. Improving accuracy beyond given by a single pulse probing requires emission of several probing pulses. Total displacement error will than fall with the square root of the number of executed measurements. Yet this method will not extend available distance beyond the limit set by threshold detection systems. Acquisition of the full waveform of received signals is a method that allows extension of maximum range through synchronic addition of subsequent waveforms. Doing so improves SNR by a well-known factor of square root of the number of carried additions. Disadvantage of this method is that it requires use of fast analog to digital converters for data acquisition, and simple distance calculation algorithms may not give the adequate accuracy due to relatively long sampling period of reasonable priced ADC’s. In this article more advanced algorithms of distance calculations that base on ADC raw data are presented and analyzed. Practical implementation of algorithm in prototype design of laser speed gun is shown along with real life test results.