Adaptive single photon detection under fluctuating background noise

To enhance the performance of single photon lidar in remote sensing applications, an adaptive single photon detection method under fluctuating background noise is proposed in this work. Given a desired false alarm probability, an adaptive threshold can be determined according to the background noise in real time. As a result, the single photon lidar operating under fluctuating background noise can implement high sensitivity and low false alarm rate simultaneously. Experiments are performed to verify the proposed method, and the experimental results are in accordance well within the theoretical values. In addition, the mean number of echo photons can be estimated in a fluctuating background noise environment, and the estimation accuracy is less than 1 photon.