Experimental characterization of immersed targets by polar decomposition of the Mueller matrices

Issue		Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. Volume 3, Number 3, September 1998


Page(s)		349 - 358
DOI		10.1051/epjap:1998236

DOI: 10.1051/epjap:1998236

Eur. Phys. J. AP 3, 349-358

Experimental characterization of immersed targets
by polar decomposition of the Mueller matrices

M. Floc'h - G. Le Brun - J. Cariou - J. Lotrian

Laboratoire de Spectrométrie et Optique Laser, Université de Bretagne occidentale, Faculté des Sciences et Techniques, 6, avenue Le Gorgeu, B.P. 809, 29285 Brest Cedex, France

Received: 5 December 1997 / Accepted: 6 May 1998

Abstract
The possibility of characterizing immersed targets in laboratory conditions, whatever the water surface roughness is discussed in this paper. The first idea was to reduce the interface effects or better to suppress them within the analysis.We used the Mueller formalism to characterize targets in the laboratory. In optics, each element can be described by a Mueller matrix. Then, in the present work we tried to decompose the global measured matrix and to separate the interface matrix from the target matrix which is the one of interest. This paper shows it impossible to perform such a decomposition. We succeeded in reducing the interface effects without eliminating them entirely. So this paper focuses on finding a decomposition algorithm of a Mueller matrix to deduce the polarimetric type of a target whatever the interface state.

PACS
42.25.Ja Polarization - 42.30.-d Imaging and optical processing - 42.30.Yc Other topics in imaging and optical processing

Author for correspondance: mfloch@univ-brest.fr

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