Temporal correlation methods for improvement of dial averaging statistics

Conference · Fri Nov 01 04:00:00 EST 1996

OSTI ID:390715

MacKerrow, E P; Fite, C B; Quick, C R ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab., Los Alamos, NM (United States)

The level of improvement in DIAL sensitivity, obtained by averaging over pulses in the return data set, depends on the level of temporal correlation in the data set. Data sets which have minimal correlation will display averaging statistics close to that predicted for random Gaussian noise: a variance that is inversely proportional to the number of pulses averaged. We have found that correlation exists, to some degree, in all realistic lidar data. In particular we have observed small baseline drifts in data obtained over long time intervals (30 min.). We present postprocessing methods for removing correlation due to baseline drifts and discuss the implications associated with these methods. We find that the standard DIAL technique of taking the ratio of pulse-pairs does not always help the averaging statistics. We have measure the effect that small correlated albedo noise levels have on averaging in the presence of larger speckle noise. The result that we find is that the independent speckle component does indeed average as random noise initially and that the limiting sensitivity is determined by the correlated noise components. 5 refs., 6 figs.

• OSTI ID: 390715
• Report Number(s): CONF-960613--
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
AERIAL MONITORING
AERIAL SURVEYING
ALBEDO
DATA PROCESSING
IMAGE PROCESSING
NOISE
OPTICAL RADAR
PULSE TECHNIQUES
SENSITIVITY
STATISTICAL MODELS