Statistical analysis of polarization responses for landmines in various solar angles and backgrounds using airborne laser imagery

摘要

This paper establishes the class separability of mines in various backgrounds for the low sun angle using Dec. 2000 and June 2001 airborne 808nm laser imagery. Specifically, this paper provides the polarization distributions of mines and background types based on four statistics: in-plane (P); cross-plane (S), P-S, and degree of polarization (DoP = (P-S)/(P+S)). This study provides a first look at which polarization can benefit the performance for airborne minefield detection and under which background conditions for a particular time of the year (i.e. low sun angle scenarios). This study presenting the polarization class distribution provides a good basis for the algorithm development effort for an automatic mine/minefield detection system using 808nm laser imagery. This study used two subsets from the December 2000 and June 2001 airborne data collections collected with the Sci-Tech breadboard 808 nm laser. To accurately represent the distribution of the mines and background, there are 24,000 mine and 144,000 background pixels were manually chosen to ensure the "perfect" registration between pixels located in P and S images for the same mine or background.