Application of polarization diversity in active imaging
The polarization diversity of laser scattering field is studied in this paper.According to the vector small perturbation solution of extinction theorem,the scattering field from rough surfaces is classified as the zero order or higher order solution. When the light incident is linearly polarized, the polarization degree of reflected light is 1, the scattering light is partial polarized and changes of polarization degree have relation to the observational plane. Stokes-Muller system is used to measure the depolarization matrices of different surfaces. The results show that the slick plane can keep polarizability of incident linearly polarized light and rough plane will result in polarization loss. Long distance imaging experiments show polarization diversity active imaging can increase detective and discriminative efficiency.