Reflective Tomography Lidar Image Reconstruction for Long Distance Non-Cooperative Target

Abstract

In the long-distance space target detection, the technique of laser reflection tomography (LRT) shows great power and attracts more attention for further study and real use. However, space targets are often non-cooperative, and normally a 360° complete view of reflection projections cannot be obtained. Therefore, this article firstly introduces an improved LRT system design with more advanced laser equipment for long-distance non-cooperative detection to ensure the high quality of the lidar beam and the lidar projection data. Then, the LRT image reconstruction is proposed and focused on the laser image reconstruction method utilizing the total variation (TV) minimization approach based on the sparse algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) model, in order to reconstruct the laser image in a sparse or incomplete view of projections. At last, comparative experiments with the system are performed to validate the advantages of this method with the LRT system. In both near and far field experiments, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified for different types of projection data through comparison to typical methods.