Efficient model of photon-counting laser radar for distance error calibration

An efficient model of a photon-counting laser radar for distance error calibration is proposed. Photon-counting laser radars have a distance error due to the dead time of their detectors and circuit elements. Although a method to correct the error by modeling the effect of dead time has been proposed, it suffers from a trade-off between the computational cost and precision because of a stochastic approximation by Monte Carlo simulation. Thus, it requires many simulations to precisely compute the distance error. The purpose of this paper is to present an error correction method with a small computational cost that maintains the model's precision. The proposed method applies a deterministic approximation that does not require iterative simulations. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can compute the distance error with a smaller computational cost and with the same precision as the conventional method using a Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed method takes 580-600 ms, while the conventional method takes 212-213 s; thus, computation is approximately 350 times faster.