Abstract
In this paper, we proposed a stepping equivalent range-gate method (S-ERG method) to measure the speed and the distance of the moving target for range-gated imaging lidar. In this method, the speed is obtained by recording the time at which the moving target passes the front and back edges of the range gate, the distance information can also be obtained by the front and back edges of the range gate at the same time. To verify the feasibility of this method, a stationary target and a moving target with different speeds were measured by the S-ERG method. By using the S-ERG method, we not only obtained the distance information of the stationary target and the moving target at the front and back edges of the range gate, respectively, but also obtained the speed of the moving target. Compared to speeds measured by rotational displacement sensors, the speed measurement error of the S-ERG method is less than 5%, whether the target is far away or close to the range-gated lidar system, and this method is almost independent of the delay step time. The theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate range-gated imaging lidar using the S-ERG method has high practicality and wide applications.