Transmitting characteristics of polarization information under seawater

We have presented the performance evaluation for light communication under water based on polarization information. In particular, we focused on the transmitting characteristics of the polarized lights under different conditions of water types and link distances. The trajectories of transmitted photons propagating in a water channel can be simulated based on the Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm. The simulated results demonstrate that the intensity of the polarized light after being transmitted underwater decreases sharply as the transmission distance increases, but the degree of polarization (DoP) of the transmitted lights remains above 0.75. The polarization retrieve (PR) method is used for reducing the scattering impact on the DoP of the light, and the maximal enhancement of the linear degree of polarization (LDoP) can be obtained as about 16%. Meanwhile, the modified PR method with a different retrieval Mueller matrix (RMM) derived from different distances (l) of the transmission channel has also been investigated, which shows that the retrieval accuracy will be enhanced with the increase of transmission distance of the RMM. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America