High-speed airborne single-photon LiDAR with GHz-gated single-photon detector at 1550 nm

•High-speed airborne single-photon LiDAR at 1550 nm.•Quasi-continuous Geiger-mode single-photon detector with sinusoidal gating waves at 1-GHz.•Fast rough data distillation from large background noise.•Suitable for terrain mapping and 3D city modeling. We report a high-speed airborne single-photon counting LiDAR at 1550 nm. By using a quasi-continuous Geiger-mode single-photon detector with sinusoidal gating waves at 1-GHz with a 1-MHz repetition rate pulsed laser as the emitting source, a point cloud rate of 1.4 × 106 points per second was obtained at the average flight height of 620 m, while the receiving aperture of the LiDAR was only 15.3 mm. To preclude the background data in the daylight which was about 30 times higher than the signal data, we proposed a processing algorithm based on the difference of signal and noise in density distribution to distill the three-dimension information of the targets. The clear reconstructed image indicates the airborne LiDAR and its data processing algorithm were qualified for terrain mapping and three-dimensional city modeling.