Prior Waveform Guided Network (PWGN) for Laser Detection in Fog

Abstract

With the rapid development of autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics, lidar has been one of the most popular researches in the world. But the poor ranging accuracy and detection range in the foggy situation have limited the application of lidar. In this paper, the detection of pulsed lidar in fog is investigated. The transmission model in the fog of the laser signal is established by considering laser backscattering in the fog. A Prior Waveform Guided Network (PWGN) based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed. The results of simulation and experiments show that the PWGN can effectively remove the interference of fog in the detection of pulsed laser signal. The mean of absolute errors(MAE) of the detection achieves 3.13 cm at the range of 10 m at the scattering rate of 30%. The MAE may be half or 1/3 of the MAEs of other approaches at the detection range of 42 m.