Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

The display of polarimetric imaging data has been a subject of considerable debate. Display strategies range from direct display of the Stokes vector images (or their derivatives) to false color representations. In many cases, direct interpretation of polarimetric image data using traditional display strategies is not intuitive and can at times result in confusion as to what benefit polarimetric information is actually providing. Here we investigate approaches that attempt to augment the s0 image with polarimetric information, rather than directly display it, as a means of enhancing the baseband s0 image. The benefit is that the polarization-enhanced visible or infrared image maintains a familiar look without the need for complex interpretation of the meaning of the polarimetric data, thus keeping the incorporation of polarimetric information transparent to the end user. The method can be applied to monochromatic or multi-band data, which allows color to be used for representing spectral data in multi-or hyper-spectropolarimetric applications. We take a more subjective approach to image enhancement than current techniques employ by simply seeking to improve contrast and shape information for polarized objects within a scene. We find that such approaches provide clear enhancement to the imagery when polarized objects are contained within the scene without the need for complex interpretation of polarization phenomenology

Adapting the HSV polarization-color mapping for regions with low irradiance and high polarization

Many mappings from polarization into color have been developed so that polarization information can be displayed. One of the most common of these maps the angle of linear polarization into color hue and degree of linear polarization into color saturation, while preserving the irradiance information from the polarization data. While this strategy enjoys wide popularity, there is a large class of polarization images for which it is not ideal. It is common to have images where the strongest polarization signatures (in terms of degree of polarization) occur in regions of relatively low irradiance: either in shadow in reflective bands or in cold regions in emissive bands. Since the irradiance is low, the chromatic properties of the resulting images are generally not apparent. Here we present an alternate mapping that uses the statistics of the angle of polarization as a measure of confidence in the polarization signature, then amplifies the irradiance in regions of high confidence, and leaves it unchanged in regions of low confidence. Results are shown from an LWIR and a visible spectrum imager