Abstract

Bathymetric lidar waveforms may be inverted to generate 3D reflectance images of the shallow-water seafloor. The accuracy of these images is improved when the radiometric inversion accounts for losses arising from the scattering of photons out of the receiver’s field of view. Here, we present a new procedure for predicting this loss that is easily implementable in real time. Our technique employs a look-up table containing coefficients for a simple proxy equation yielding loss values that are close approximations to those computed with the full analytical expression for the field of view loss. The coefficients were determined by fitting the proxy equation to thousands of loss functions generated with the full analytical expression wherein we systematically varied geometric and environmental parameters. This work contributes to the goal of generating real-time 3D reflectance images in future bathymetric lidar systems.

© 2013 Optical Society of America