Anomaly detection with varied ground sample distance utilizing spectropolarimetric imagery collected using a liquid crystal tunable filter

Abstract

Liquid crystal tunable filters (LCTFs) are a technology that can act as both a spectral and linear polarization filter for an imaging device. Paired with the appropriate hardware, a LCTF can be configured to collect hyperspectral Stokes imagery which contains both spectral as well as polarimetric information on a per-pixel level basis. This data is used to investigate the utility of spectro-polarimetric data with standard spectral analysis algorithms, in this case anomaly detection. A method to simulate different ground sample distances (GSDs) is used to illustrate the effect on algorithm performance. In this paper, a spectro-polarimetric imager is presented that can collect spectro-polarimetric image cubes in units of calibrated sensor reaching radiance. The system is used to collect imagery of two scenes, each containing die-cast scale vehicles and different background types. An anomaly detector is applied to the intensity and polarized image cubes to find those pixels that are different from the background spectrally and/or polarimetrically. The effect of changing the apparent GSD on the anomaly detection performance is explored. This shows that applying anomaly detection to spectro-polarimetric data can improve the false alarm rate over standard spectral data for finding certain types of man-made objects in complex backgrounds.