Research of detecting the laser's secondary reflected echo from target by using Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode

When the Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (Gm-APD) laser detection and ranging (LADAR) carries out the air-to-ground detection, it can detect the echo that is successively reflected by targets and the ground, which causes the false target in the image obtained by the LADAR. In this paper, the echo which is successively reflected by two surfaces is called the secondary reflected echo, and the echo which is just reflected once is called the single reflected echo. Considering the Gm-APD's superior ability to detect photon, we investigate and analyze the triggering characteristics of the Gm-APD for detecting the secondary reflected laser echo from the targets, also, we carry out the experiments on detecting the secondary reflected echo in near field and far field by using array Gm-APD to verify that the array Gm-APD can effectively detect the secondary reflected echo, and this paper lays the foundation for the research of the secondary reflection's influence on the images obtained by Gm-APD. In this paper, firstly, we use the echo triggering model, which contains LADAR ranging equation and Poisson probability model, and the Monte Carlo simulating method to completely verify the possibility of detecting the secondary reflected echo by using Gm-APD, in theory. The theoretical results show that Gm-APD can detect the secondary reflected echo, and the wider the field of view(FOV) is, the longer the detecting range is, besides, the higher the LADAR is located at, the lower the target's secondary reflected echo's intensity is and the higher the ground's single reflected echo's intensity is; then, using the Gm-APD with an array of 64×64 and 32×32 to detect the indoor scene and the moving van in far field, respectively, the results show that the indoor experiment obtains the complete first and second reflected image and the single pixel can detect the secondary reflected echo from multiple targets, also, for the far-field experiment, the single reflected echo and second reflected echo can be obtained in a single frame image, and under this experimental conditions, two pixels which are studied, realize the range extension of 25.6 m and 41.9 m respectively, which shows that the Gm-APD can likely detect the false target in the far field; finally, the methods that finding the secondary reflected surface by using the multiple-frame statistics for static targets and the image of triggering position in chronological order for moving targets, respectively, are proposed to eliminate the secondary reflected image. This article can provide some theoretical references for eliminating the secondary reflection before target recognition.