Cramer-Rao lower bound for the estimation of the degree of polarization in active coherent imagery at low photon level

Abstract

International audienceThe degree of polarization (DOP) is an important tool in many optical measurement and imaging applications. We address the problem of its estimation in images that are perturbed with both speckle and photon noises, by determining the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) when the illuminated materials are purely depolarizing. We demonstrate that the CRLB is simply the sum of the CRLBs due to speckle noise and to Poisson noise. We use this result to analyze the influence of different optical parameters on DOP estimation