Energy-Barycenter Based Waveform Centroid Algorithm for Pulse Lidar Ranging System

This paper proposes an energy-barycenter-based waveform centroid algorithm (EWCA) for a high-precision Lidar ranging system. Firstly, the emission and echo pulse models of the pulse Lidar ranging system are established. Secondly, based on analyzing the merits and demerits of the conventional waveform centroid algorithm (CWCA) and intensity-weighted waveform centroid discrimination algorithm (IWCD). Moreover, combined with the characteristics of the energy moment distribution, the adaptive strategy is used to select the point with the higher signal as the calculation time series, and we proposed the EWCA to calculate the timing moment. Finally, we compared EWCA with CWCA and IWCD through simulation and actual experiments. The experimental simulation results show EWCA has higher accuracy and robustness than the comparison algorithm with different SNR. EWCA can achieve an average error of 0.1235 ns, a standard deviation of 0.0848 ns, and variance of 0.0072 ns at an SNR of 5 dB. At the same time, the Lidar ranging system is established to compare these methods further, and the ranging error of the proposed method can be within 20 mm when the measured distance is 40 m. This method has higher timing accuracy and application range, which has the potential to handle further ranging tasks.