Laser time-of-flight measurement based on time-delay estimation and fitting correction

Abstract

We describe a method based on multichannel time-delay estimation with linear fitting correction for laser time-of-flight (TOF) measurement. The laser TOF measurement system is constructed with a laser source, a stop receiver channel, a reference receiver multichannel, an analog to digital converter (ADC) sampling unit, and a digital signal processing unit. Limited by the sampling rate, the precision of laser TOF measurement is restricted no more than the ADC sampling period in conventional methods. As this problem is considered, multichannel correlation time-delay estimation with linear fitting correction is devised. It is shown that the measuring precision is better than 2ns with multichannel time-delay estimation and not influenced by signal-to-noise ratio. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and stable. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.