PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
July 2016
455
S
ingle Photon-sensitive Lidar or SPL (Degnan et al, 2015) was developed by
Sigma Space Corporation. Compared to conventional lidar (also called linear
lidar, Abdullah, 2016) systems that require hundreds of detected photons to
make a range measurement, SPL requires only one detected photon. With
such high sensitivity, SPL can divide one light beam into one hundred beamlets, with
the surface returns of each beamlet imaged onto one pixel of a 100 pixel detector,
and simultaneously make a high-density, multiple-return measurement for a 5m x 5m
topographic area from a single outgoing laser pulse. As a result, the increased point
density per laser pulse releases the requirement of high pulse repetition rate for linear
lidar systems and allows the SPL system to work at much higher altitude and with a
wider swath. Such systems have been made available quite recently and are attracting
interests from diverse professionals (Abdullah, 2016). In this paper, we will present the
results of an initial study on the mapping capabilities and performance of the SPL system
by exploring three different sample datasets over forest, urban, and bathymetric areas.
By Qinghua Li, John Degnan, Terence Barrett, and Jie Shan
First Evaluation on Single Photon-
Sensitive Lidar Data
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 82, No. 7, July 2016, pp. 455–463.
0099-1112/16/455–463
© 2016 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.82.7.455
