Data acquisition and processing of correlation ranging system with chaotic laser

A data acquisition and processing method is reported for correlation ranging with chaotic laser, which can be used for automotive collision avoidance, fiber or cable fault inspection. We used a data acquisition card with 125 MHz bandwidth and 2ms memory depth as platform to design acquisition and processing. The acquisition and storage were programmed by using Visual Basic, and an average discrete-component elimination algorithm was proposed and programmed to caculate real-time correlation with high signal-to-noise ratio. In the demonstration, we utilized this acquisition and processing system to locate fiber fault with chaotic light, and experimentally obtained an accuracy below 0.25 m.