Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which is used in most audio and video, reduces transmission time and results in much smaller file sizes. However, this compression can affect quality if it goes too far. The more compression there is on a waveform, the more degradation there is, and once a file is lossy compressed, this process is not reversible. This project will observe the degradation of an audio signal after the application of Singular Value Decomposition compression, a lossy compression that eliminates singular values from a signal’s matrix.

The idea for this thesis emerged from my senior design capstone project, A Wearable Threat Awareness System. A TFmini-S LiDAR sensor is used as one component of this system; the functionality of and signal processing behind this type of sensor are elucidated in this document. Conceptual implementations of the optical and digital stages of the signal processing is described in some detail. Following an introduction in which some general background knowledge about LiDAR is set forth, the body of the thesis is organized into two main sections. The first section focuses on optical processing to demodulate the received signal backscattered from the target object. This section describes the key steps in demodulation and illustrates them with computer simulation. A series of graphs capture the mathematical form of the signal as it progresses through the optical processing stages, ultimately yielding the baseband envelope which is converted to digital form for estimation of the leading edge of the pulse waveform using a digital algorithm. The next section is on range estimation. It describes the digital algorithm designed to estimate the arrival time of the leading edge of the optical pulse signal. This enables the pulse’s time of flight to be estimated, thus determining the distance between the LiDAR and the target. Performance of this algorithm is assessed with four different levels of noise. A calculation of the error in the leading-edge detection in terms of distance is also included to provide more insight into the algorithm’s accuracy.