Bilateral bad pixel and Stokes image reconstruction for microgrid polarimetric imagers

摘要

Uncorrected or poorly corrected bad pixels reduce the effectiveness of polarimetric clutter suppression. In conventional microgrid processing, bad pixel correction is accomplished as a separate step from Stokes image reconstruction. Here, these two steps are combined to speed processing and provide better estimates of the entire image, including missing samples. A variation on the bilateral filter enables both edge preservation in the Stokes imagery and bad pixel suppression. Understanding the newly presented filter requires two key insights. First, the adaptive nature of the bilateral filter is extended to correct for bad pixels by simply incorporating a bad pixel mask. Second, the bilateral filter for Stokes estimation is the sum of the normalized bilateral filters for estimating each analyzer channel individually. This paper describes the new approach and compares it to our legacy method using simulated imagery.