Paper Info
Title
Polarization: Beneficial For Visibility Enhancement?
Abstract
When imaging in scattering media there is a need to enhance visibility. Some approaches have used polarized images in this context with apparent success. These methods take advantage of the fact that the path radiance (airlight) is partially polarized. However, mounting a polarizer attenuates the signal associated with the object. This attenuation degrades the image quality. Thus, a question arises: is the use of a polarizer worth the mentioned loss? The ability to see objects is limited by noise. Therefore, in this work we analyze the change in signal to noise ratio (SNR) following the use of a polarizer or a dehazing process. Typically, methods use either one polarized image (with minimum path radiance) or two polarized images corresponding to extrema of the path radiance. We show that if the only goal is signal discrimination over noise (and not color or radiance recovery) in haze, the use of polarization in both approaches is unnecessary: polarization rarely improves the SNR over an average of unpolarized images acquired under the same acquisition time. Nevertheless, under a single frame constraint, the use of a single polarized image is beneficial.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/CVPRW.2009.5206551
CVPR: 2009 IEEE CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION, VOLS 1-4
Keywords
Field
DocType
photonics,image processing,signal detection,light scattering,signal analysis,visibility,attenuation,polarization,signal to noise ratio,scattering,brightness,atmospheric modeling,optical scattering,image quality,layout,snr,colored noise,imaging
Computer vision,Visibility,Detection theory,Computer science,Polarizer,Signal-to-noise ratio,Image quality,Image processing,Artificial intelligence,Optical polarization,Radiance
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2009
1
1063-6919
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.74
13
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tali Treibitz117813.09
Yoav Y. Schechner262958.12