The effect of incident light polarization on vegetation Bidirectional Reflectance Factor

A laboratory-based Bidirectional Reflectance Factor (BRF) polarization study of vegetation is presented in this paper. The BRF was measured using a short-arc Xenon lamp/monochromator assembly producing a tunable light source with a well-defined spectral bandpass at the following visible and near-infrared wavelengths: 340nm, 470 nm, and 870 nm. All vegetation samples were measured using P and S linearly polarized incident light over a range of incident and scatter angles. By comparing these results, we quantitatively examined how the BRF of the samples depends on the polarization of the incident light. The differences are significant, depend strongly on the incident and scatter angles, and can be as high as 135% at 67 deg incident and 470nm.