Patent — available for licensing
Photon-Efficient Scanning LiDAR System
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Scanning LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an advanced remote sensing technology that uses laser pulses to create high-resolution, three-dimensional maps of surfaces. Traditional LiDAR systems often lack control over uniform scanning patterns, leading to inefficient or redundant information over uniform terrains like deserts and oceans, resulting in unnecessary power consumption and data storage challenges. Scanned data is compressed because much of the data is duplicative and can waste LiDAR resources such as photons, power , and detector capacity while also burdening data transfer, storage, and processing systems. NASA engineers have developed a novel LiDAR approach utilizing compressive coded aperture scanning to address the inefficiencies of state-of-the-art LiDAR systems to build a 3D map of a selected area more efficiently. This method enhances photon efficiency by selectively omitting certain pixels during the scan and employing sophisticated algorithms to reconstruct the missing data, thereby optimizing resource utilization without compromising data quality.