Editorial Introduction to JSTQE Special Issue on Lidars and Photonic Radars

The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the recent progress, challenges and trends in the different aspects related to lidars and photonic radars. The emerging field of Lidars and Photonic Radars has opened up new horizons for extensive transfer of state-of-the-art technologies coming from the areas of quantum electronics, lasers and electro-optics to high-precision wireless detection and sensing. Lidars have developed so fast that they are becoming the key sensors in applications including autonomous vehicles, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), etc. Photonic radars achieve dramatically improved performance over traditional radars, enabling high resolution and fast detection in all-day and all-weather conditions. New trends of lidar and photonic radar have attracted much attention such as AI-enhanced system, lidar-radar fusion system and single-photon lidar and so on.