Recent development of hyperspectral LiDAR using supercontinuum laser

Hyperspectral Light Detection And Ranging (Hyperspectral LiDAR), a recently developed technique, combines the advantages of the LiDAR and hyperspectral imaging and has been attractive for many applications. Supercontinuum laser (SC laser), a rapidly developing technique offers hyperspectral LiDAR a suitable broadband laser source and makes hyperspectral Lidar become an installation from a theory. In this paper, the recent research and progressing of the hyperspectral LiDAR are reviewed. The hyperspectral LiDAR has been researched in theory, prototype system, instrument, and application experiment. However, the pulse energy of the SC laser is low so that the range of the hyperspectral LiDAR is limited. Moreover, considering the characteristics of sensors and A/D converter, in order to obtain the full waveform of the echo, the repetition rate and the pulse width of the SC laser needs to be limited. Recently, improving the detection ability of hyperspectral LiDAR, especially improving the detection range, is a main research area. A higher energy pulse SC laser, a more sensitive sensor, or some algorithms are applied in hyperspectral LiDAR to improve the detection distance from 12 m to 1.5 km. At present, a lot of research has been focused on this novel technology which would be applied in more applications.