Long-range polarimetric imaging through fog

We report an experimental implementation of long-range polarimetric imaging through fog over kilometric distance in real field atmospheric conditions. An incoherent polarized light source settled on a telecommunication tower is imaged at a distance of 1.3 km with a snapshot polarimetric camera including a birefringent Wollaston prism, allowing simultaneous acquisition of two images along orthogonal polarization directions. From a large number of acquisitions datasets and under various environmental conditions (clear sky/fog/haze, day/night), we compare the efficiency of using polarized light for source contrast increase with different signal representations (intensity, polarimetric difference, polarimetric contrast, etc.). With the limited-dynamics detector used, a maximum fourfold increase in contrast was demonstrated under bright background illumination using polarimetric difference image. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America