Sea Surface Slope Recovery through Passive Polarimetric Imaging

The goal of this project is to develop a technique to recover sea surface slopes and orientations over a distributed area using a non-intrusive imaging polarimeter. The technique relies upon the incidence angle dependence of the Fresnel coefficients at the air/water interface. Different incidence angles will lead to different polarization states in the reflected light. This is an ill-posed problem, whose challenges include multi-valued slope solutions using the polarization measurements, resolving the impact of the sky incident radiance (and polarization of the radiance), treating upwelling light and unresolved waves. In this paper, we will discuss the optimization algorithm appropriate for this type of inverse problem, describe the sensor, and show high-resolution data from a field experiment.