Spectro-polarimetric BRDF determination of objects using in-scene calibration materials for polarimetric imagers

Abstract

For sensing systems that characterize the spectro-polarimetric radiance reaching the camera, the origin of the sensed phenomenology is a complex mixture of sources. While some of these sources do not contribute to the polarimetric signature, many do such as the downwelled sky polarization, the target and background p- BRDF(polarimetric bi-directional reflectance distribution function), the upwelled sky polarization, and the camera Mueller matrix transfer function. In this paper we investigate candidate in-scene calibration materials potentially allowing for portions of the p-BRDF to be derived for material surfaces throughout the scene. Extraction of target p-BRDF from the sensed spectro-polarimetric energy may result in improved target detection performance in the future. Results using both synthetic and real data are presented.