Investigating Clutter Reduction for Unmanned Systems Applications using Imaging Polarimetry

摘要

The proliferation of unmanned systems in recent years has sparked increased interest in multiple areas of research for on-board image processing including autonomous navigation, surveillance, detection, and tracking to name a few. For these applications, techniques for reducing scene clutter provide an increased level of robustness for autonomous systems and reduced operator burden for tele-operated systems. Because imaging polarimetry frequently provides complementary information to the standard radiometric image, it is anticipated that this technology is well suited to provide a significant reduction in scene clutter. In this paper, the authors investigate the use of imaging polarimetry under a number of representative scenarios to assess the utility of this technology for unmanned system applications.