Entropy of partially polarized light and application to statistical processing techniques

Philippe Réfrégier (1) , François Goudail (1) , Pierre Chavel (2) , Ari Friberg (3)

1 FRESNEL - Institut FRESNEL
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Scop
3 Kungliga Tekniska Ho skolan

We have analyzed entropy properties of coherent and partially polarized light in an arbitrary number of spatial dimensions. We show that for Gaussian fields, the Shannon entropy is a simple function of the intensity and of the Barakat degree of polarization. In particular, we provide a probabilistic interpretation of this definition of the degree of polarization. Using information theory results, we also deduce some physical properties of partially polarized light such as additivity of the entropy and depolarization effects induced by mixing partially polarized states of light. Finally, we demonstrate that entropy measures can play an important role in segmentation and detection tasks

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Philippe Réfrégier, François Goudail, Pierre Chavel, Ari Friberg. Entropy of partially polarized light and application to statistical processing techniques. Journal of the Optical Society of America. A Optics, Image Science, and Vision, 2004, 21 (11), pp.2124-2134. ⟨hal-00079555⟩