Improving the performance of depth estimation with the rising edge fitting method

High-resolution detection of optical surfaces is crucial for enhancing the performance of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems. Single-photon LiDAR has emerged as a leading technology for precise depth estimation, which is indispensable in application fields such as biological imaging, autonomous navigation, and virtual reality. However, most existing depth estimation algorithms heavily rely on peak position information in single-photon LiDAR data, making them significantly affected by peak jitter. In this work, a time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) LiDAR system has been built, and what we believe to be a new depth estimation method based on the rising edge of the instrument response function has been proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is less subject to peak jitter and can achieve much lower errors and faster convergence speed under the same conditions, comparing with several existing methods.