Active spectro-polarimetric imaging: signature modeling, imaging demonstrator and target detection

We report on the synthesis of our work on the analysis of active spectro-polarimetric imaging concept of real-world scenes. These synthesis extend from the investigation of depolarization mechanisms up to image analysis and processing. We show in particular that depolarization effects are wavelength dependent and strongly correlated with light absorption of materials. Multi-wavelength images of degree of polarization are recorded and analyzed, evidencing that the polarimetric image must be interpreted in conjunction with its counterpart intensity image in order to extract, the most relevant information from the scene. For real field operation, the noise characteristics of polarimetric images are also investigated under coherent laser illumination. The potential increase of target detection performance brought by properly processing the active polarimetric image is illustrated on a very low contrast scene.