This article discusses the history of laser radar development in America, Europe, and Asia. Direct detection laser radar is discussed for range finding, designation, and topographic mapping of Earth and of extraterrestrial objects. Coherent laser radar is discussed for environmental applications, such as wind sensing and for synthetic aperture laser radar development. Gated imaging is discussed through scattering layers for military, medical, and security applications. Laser microradars have found applications in intravascular studies and in ophthalmology for vision correction. Ghost laser radar has emerged as a new technology in theoretical and simulation applications. Laser radar is now emerging as an important technology for applications such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. It is also used by police to measure speed, and in gaming, such as the Microsoft Kinect.

The first steps of laser radar are discussed with the examples from range finding and designation. The followed successes in field tests and further fast development provided their wide use. Coherent laser radar, developed almost simultaneously, tried the ideas from microwaves including chirp technology for pulse compression, and Doppler mode of operation. This latter found a unique implementation in a cruise missile. In many applications, environmental studies very strongly rely upon the lidars sensing the wind, temperature, constituents, optical parameters. Lidars are used in the atmosphere and in the sea water measurements. Imaging and mapping is an important role prescribed to ladars. One of the prospective trends in laser radar development is incorporation of range and velocity data into the image information. Deep space program, even having not come to the finish, gave a lot for 3D imaging. Gated imaging, as one of the 3D techniques, demonstrated its prospects (seeing through scattering layers) for military and security usage. Synthetic aperture laser radar, which had a long incubation period, started to show first results, at least in modeling. Coherent laser radar baptized as the optical coherence tomography, along with the position sensitive laser radar, synthetic aperture laser radar, multispectral laser radar demonstrated very pragmatic results in the micro-scale applications.

PURPOSE: Of all transforms of an eye, aberrations are significant when higher visual acuity is to be achieved. Ray tracing aberrometry developed by the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (Kiev) and first tested at the Vardinoyannion Eye Institute of Crete is a promising technique for eye refraction aberration and refraction mapping. METHODS: The technique uses measurement of the position of a thin laser beam projected onto the retina. The beam is directed into the eye parallel to the visual axis. Each entrance point provides its own projection on the retina. A set of entrance points forms a set of projections. From these data, a refraction map is reconstructed as well as a point spread function of the eye. The total time of scanning over the whole aperture of the eye is within 10 to 20 ms and depends on the number of test points at the eye entrance, as well as on the number of independent measurements in each point. Configuration of the scanning pattern can be chosen by the operator. It may contain 60 to 400 points, each checked 1 to 5 times. RESULTS: Preliminary studies showed high reproducibility of results. Twenty Pseudophakie eyes were subjected to 30 consecutive measurements each. Ninety-five percent of all measured values were within ±0.20 D of declination from the mean. CONCLUSIONS: Ray tracing aberrometry is a flexible technology for eye investigation. It can be adapted to any laser technique of vision correction Its further development should be oriented on laser-linked applications of the refraction driven refractive surgery. [J Refract Surg 2000;16: S572-S575]

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An optimization algorithm to be used in point-source corneal topographers is developed for the reconstruction of the topography of aspheric corneal surfaces. It is based on the damped least-squares technique. The reconstructions obtained with a topographer comprising 48 or 90 point sources for corneas having different forms (spherical, conicoidal, complex) and apical radii (5-16 mm) were simulated numerically. Zernike polynomials up to the seventh radial order were used for the description of the shape of the anterior corneal surface. With no noise, i.e. uncertainty in the position of the image of each object point, it is shown that this approach allows reconstruction of the surface with a root-mean-square (RMS) error of<5 x 10(-7) microm for the elevation map and 3 x 10(-7) diopter for the refraction map. With noise, to get an averaged surface elevation RMS error of <1 microm, or an averaged refraction RMS error of <0.25 diopter, each spot must be located (in the image plane) with an error <1 microm.

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