Measurement and modeling of polarized reflectance factor on rough coating materials using a goniometer instrument

Abstract

The study of spectral polarization characteristics of different materials is benefit to improve the abilities of object recognition and polarization remote sensing applications. Most of studies focus on the degree of polarization of the material, the polarized reflectance factor is rarely reported. In this study, we measure the spectral polarized reflectance factor of typical rough coating materials (green and black paint) in the range of 400–900 nm. The polarization reflectance characteristics of coating materials have been analyzed based on the measured data sets and the polarization mechanism. Moreover, a polarized reflectance parameter model is built with the basic of the Kubelka-Munk theory, and the optimal model parameters are fitted by the genetic algorithm. The analyses indicate that our measured polarized reflectance factors of the rough coating samples are spectrally neutral, and the distribution of the polarized reflectance factor is obviously anisotropic. The polarized reflectance parameter model provides good fits to the measurements, which confirms the validity and reliability of the modeling, and can precisely describe the polarization reflectance behaviors of rough coating materials. We also found that contrast between the rough coating samples and typical natural background in polarized reflectance factor is much greater than in degree of linear polarization in visible and near-infrared bands, which suggests that it is more helpful to distinguish the objects in natural environment by using the polarized reflectance factor indicator. The study has a great potential for object identification and polarization scene modeling.