Reply to post: Re: Signal to noise and interference

Pioneer slaps 80s LASERS on cars for driverless push

Jaybus

Re: Signal to noise and interference

With LIDAR, the light will back-scatter from multiple targets most of the time, including dust, fog, diesel particulates, and other so-called soft targets. But the vast majority of the scattered light being returned is coming from a hard target (vehicle, ground, etc.) The distance calculation (based on quadrature detection) is not simply the phase of the return signal, but a phase,magnitude vector. The return signal seen by the detector is the convolution of the signals from every scatter target. Signal components from soft targets in front of a hard target will cause its distance to appear closer and soft targets further away will cause it to appear further away, but only to a small degree, since the magnitude of a soft target signal is tiny compared to the magnitude of a hard target.

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