Extending AMCW Lidar Depth-of-Field Using a Coded Aperture

By augmenting a high resolution full-field Amplitude Modulated Continuous Wave lidar system with a coded aperture, we show that depth-of-field can be extended using explicit, albeit blurred, range data to determine PSF scale. Because complex domain range-images contain explicit range information, the aperture design is unconstrained by the necessity for range determination by depth-from-defocus. The coded aperture design is shown to improve restoration quality over a circular aperture. A proof-of-concept algorithm using dynamic PSF determination and spatially variant Landweber iterations is developed and using an empirically sampled point spread function is shown to work in cases without serious multipath interference or high phase complexity.