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Photon-Counting Lidar Remote Sensing: <italic>Current progress and future trends</italic>
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DOI：10.1109/mgrs.2026.3660928.png)
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Abstract
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This article provides a comprehensive review of photon-counting lidar systems. With the rapid advancement of photon-counting detectors and their supporting technologies, these systems—characterized by their sensitivity to individual photons—have emerged as a promising solution for next-generation active remote sensing. Photon-counting lidar systems facilitate high-resolution, large-scale 3D Earth observation with extremely low energy consumption, making them a crucial technical foundation for future remote sensing applications. <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Despite their significant advantages in precision and energy efficiency, the widespread application of photon-counting lidar in remote sensing continues to encounter several critical challenges. They include limitations in hardware performance, underdeveloped data processing algorithms, and inadequate physical modeling capabilities in complex environments.</p> <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">This article systematically reviews the recent technical advancements in photon-counting lidar systems for remote sensing, encompassing system architecture, detection principles, data processing workflows, and representative application scenarios. A particular emphasis is placed on the technological evolution of core hardware components, such as laser sources and photon detectors. The review underscores the tradeoff between detection range and spatial resolution as well as the challenges associated with limited signal discrimination accuracy in the presence of multitarget interference or strong scattering conditions. Furthermore, support for advanced modulation schemes—such as frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW), phase-modulated continuous wave, and vortex beams—remains in its early stages. Among emerging detectors, superconducting nanowire photon-counting detectors exhibit significant potential because of their near-unity detection efficiency and ultralow dark count rates; however, their dependence on ultralow temperatures (2–4 K) presents considerable challenges for engineering deployment and miniaturization.</p> <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">At the theoretical level, photon-counting lidar systems exhibit high sensitivity to solar radiation, water vapor absorption, and atmospheric turbulence. The modeling and inversion of photon transport in nonhomogeneous media, such as the atmosphere, seawater, and glacial ice, present significant technical challenges because of their complex physical properties and the limitations of existing theoretical frameworks.</p> <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">In this article, we summarize the state-of-the-art applications of photon-counting lidar in key remote sensing tasks, including glacier and ice sheet monitoring, forest structure retrieval, shallow-water bathymetry, and atmospheric profiling. We identify and discuss the performance boundaries, limitations, and potential breakthroughs of photon-counting lidar systems in detail.</p> <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Finally, the article outlines future research directions in the field, including multidimensional laser source modulation, integrated detector chip design, hybrid detection mode development, and enhanced modeling of photon transport in complex media. Overall, the advancement of photon-counting lidar technology is driving active remote sensing into a new era characterized by higher sensitivity, finer resolution, and reduced energy consumption. This review aims to provide a solid theoretical foundation and technical reference for the ongoing development and cross-domain application of photon-counting lidar in remote sensing.</p>
Keywords:
Earth Observing System
Payloads
Sentinel-2
Landsat
MODIS
Sentinel-1
Sonar
Phased arrays
Laser radar
Spatial resolution
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