This book is an outgrowth of the lecture notes provided by the author to his students at the Raytheon corporation, where he spent most of his professional life developing lidars. Originally used as laser rangefinders for long-distance measurements (including up to the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969), lidar has evolved into the ideal technology for a number of applications in disparate fields, like for industrial and topographic telemeters, remote sensing and mapping, autonomous vehicles, archaeology, forestry and 3D environment mapping.
This agile volume offers a well-balanced introduction to the related principles and technologies. It starts with three chapters on the laser transmitter, the receiver and the lidar constitutive equations, followed by three in-depth shorter chapters on detection statistics, resolution and light waveforms.
Then, we find an extensive chapter on modern coherent detection lidars, with two short complementary chapters on the choice of waveforms and the use of single-photon detectors. A final chapter about present and future applications summarizes the state-of-the-art technologies and products.
Review by Silvano Donati, University of Pavia, Italy.
The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or its publisher, Optica (formerly OSA).