A polarization of light based system, designed for real time applications in computer vision, making use of highlights in a metallic environment

Reprocessing cells of nuclear plants are constituted by a great number of specular metallic pipes. When they are illuminated, this kind of pipes generates areas of high light intensity, called highlights. The latter can produce erroneous results, especially in edge detection. The matter of this paper is to suppress and further to exploit the highlight effects. With this aim in view, we propose a system based on the polarization of light, which not only suppresses highlights in the scene but also uses them to extract relevant information like the pipes axes at the video rate