Abstract: Single photon lidar (also known as photon counting lidar) has detection sensitivity of single photon magnitude. Compared with traditional linear detection lidar, it can obtain longer detection distance, and it has become the frontier and development trend of lidar technology. However, the extremely high detection sensitivity also makes the single photon lidar highly susceptible to the interference of background noise photons in detection, which greatly reduces its performance in daytime and greatly limits its application scope. Based on the detection principle of single photon lidar, this paper briefly reviews its technical development, analyzes the requirements of all-time work for single photon lidar detection system, and a new spectral filtering technique is adopted to greatly improve the detection performance of single photon lidar in daylight. At the same time, this paper also proposed a general evaluation model, which can be very intuitive to evaluate the detection performance of various lidar systems.