Bio-inspired Lidar imaging with a non-uniform curved linear array receiving system

A bio-inspired Lidar imaging method using a non-uniform curved linear array receiving system is proposed. The receiving system is composed of a curved surface, a microlens array, an aperture array, and an avalanche-photodiode (APD) array. The microlens array and APD array are placed on a curved surface to mimic the large field of view (FOV) feature of the compound eye. The location distribution of the microlens array and APD array on the curved surface is non-uniform to mimic the retina-like property of the human eye. An experimental prototype, which consists of 12 microlenses and APD detectors is built and the effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated by experiments. The results show that the whole FOV of the proposed system is 25.8 degrees and it has a higher resolution in the central FOV and the lower resolution in the peripheral FOV. Moreover, the results show that the proposed Lidar imaging system has the rotation and scaling invariance property. This method is beneficial for developing a Lidar system with large FOV and high imaging efficiency.