Comparison of the estimation of the degree of polarization from four or two intensity images degraded by speckle noise

Active polarimetric imagery allows one to access the information present in a scene by revealing polarizing properties of the objects [1, 2]. Coherent light is considered in this paper as illumination of the scene, the images are thus degraded by speckle noise. The polarization properties of a scene are characterized by the degree of polarization. In standard polarimetric imagery system, four intensity images are needed to estimate this degree [3]. If we assume the uncorrelation of the measurements, this number can be decreased to two images using the Orthogonal State Contrast Image (OSCI) [4]. However, this approach appears too restrictive in some cases. We thus propose in this paper a new statistical parametric method to estimate the degree of polarization assuming correlated measurements with only two intensity images. The estimators obtained from four images, from the OSCI and from the proposed method, are compared using simulated polarimetric data degraded by speckle noise.