Real-Time Vision through Haze Based on Polarization Imaging

Abstract

Various gases and aerosols in bad weather conditions can cause severe image degradation, which will seriously affect the detection efficiency of optical monitoring stations for high pollutant discharge systems. Thus, penetrating various gases and aerosols to sense and detect the discharge of pollutants plays an important role in the pollutant emission detection system. Against this backdrop, we recommend a real-time optical monitoring system based on the Stokes vectors through analyzing the scattering characteristics and polarization characteristics of both gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. This system is immune to the effects of various gases and aerosols on the target to be detected and achieves the purpose of real-time sensing and detection of high pollutant discharge systems under bad weather conditions. The imaging system is composed of four polarizers with different polarization directions integrated into independent cameras aligned parallel to the optical axis in order to acquire the Stokes vectors from various polarized azimuth images. Our results show that this approach achieves high-contrast and high-definition images in real time without the loss of spatial resolution in comparison with the performance of conventional imaging techniques.