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

Philippe Réfrégier (1) , Muriel Roche (1) , François Goudail (2)

1 FRESNEL - Institut FRESNEL
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Scop

The 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.

Mots clés: Low light level; Speckle; Noise in imaging systems

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]

Philippe Réfrégier, Muriel Roche, François Goudail. Cramer-Rao lower bound for the estimation of the degree of polarization in active coherent imagery at low photon level. Optics Letters, 2006, 31 (24), pp.3565-3567. ⟨hal-00103402⟩