Ultrafast parallel single-pixel LiDAR with all-optical spectro-temporal encoding

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) with scanning beam has been widely used in autonomous driving and large-scale manufacturing, where the fast-changing scene is of great interest. However, the acquisition rate of current LiDAR is limited by beam steering speed and the round-trip delay, hindering the development of video-rate LiDAR. Here, we uniquely combine all-optical encoders with wavelength-division multiplexing devices to implement spectro-temporal encoding on the illumination light. Parallel detection and fast spectral scanning can be achieved with only one laser and one single photodetector. Our result shows the fastest single-pixel LiDAR to date, and the detection speed can be multiplied with scalability. We demonstrate 3.56-fold improvement of speed for a maximum of 75 m detection range compared with a serial LiDAR. A record acquisition rate of 21.38 MHz for a maximum of 25 m detection range is obtained. This approach has the potential to break the limitation on current ultrafast single-pixel LiDAR and opens a new paradigm for ultrafast-frame-rate imaging systems.