Estimation precision of the degree of polarization from a single speckle intensity image

Abstract

We address the problem of the estimation of the degree of polarization from a single intensity image. For that purpose, one considers the case of coherent active imagery that leads to speckle fluctuations and assumes that the measured intensity image corresponds to a fully developed speckle for each polarized component of the electric field. In particular, we determine the Cramer-Rao bound of the degree of polarization estimation and propose to illustrate this result by analyzing the variance of different simple estimators.