Abstract:Chaos LiDAR has attracted significant attention due to its high resolution, inherent antiinterference capability, and stealth characteristics. However, the performance of chaos LiDAR in longrange target detection and imaging is quite limited by the power of chaotic light sources, sensitivity of linear detectors, and hardware bandwidth. To overcome the bottleneck of chaos LiDAR, this paper proposes the concept of digital chaos LiDAR and conducts theoretical analysis and simulation verification. Through Monte Carlo simulation, this paper studied the detection probability, false probability, and detection range of continuous-wave chaos LiDAR, pulsed chaos LiDAR, and digital chaos LiDAR. The simulation results show that, within the confidence interval where the detection probability is greater than 95% and the false alarm probability is less than 5%, the detection range of digital chaos LiDAR is approximately 35 times and 8 times higher than that of continuous-wave chaos LiDAR and pulsed chaos LiDAR, respectively. With the advantages of ultra-high sensitivity of single-photon detectors and digital output, digital chaos LiDAR is expected to be widely used in the field of long-range target detection and imaging.