What is LIDAR and how does it work?
LIDAR is now being used in some areas for traffic speed enforcement, for vehicle speed measurement, and as a alternate technology to radar guns. The technology for this application is small enough to be mounted in a hand held camera “gun” and permits a particular vehicle’s speed to be determined from a stream of traffic. Unlike RADAR which relies on doppler shifts to directly measure speed, police lidar relies on the principle of time-of-flight to calculate speed. The equivalent radar based systems are often not able to isolate particular vehicles from the traffic stream. LIDAR has the distinct advantage of being able to pick out one vehicle in a cluttered traffic situation as long as the operator is aware of the limitations imposed by the range and beam divergence.
