Eur. Phys. J. AP 3, 349-358 (1998)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjap:1998236

Experimental characterization of immersed targets by polar decomposition of the Mueller matrices

Laboratoire de Spectrométrie et Optique Laser, Université de Bretagne occidentale, Faculté des Sciences et Techniques, 6, avenue Le Gorgeu, B.P. 809, 29285 Brest Cedex, France

Corresponding author: mfloch@univ-brest.fr

Received: 5 December 1997
Accepted: 6 May 1998
Published online: 15 September 1998

Abstract

The possibility of characterizing immersed targets in laboratory conditions, whatever the water surface roughness is discussed in this paper. The first idea was to reduce the interface effects or better to suppress them within the analysis.We used the Mueller formalism to characterize targets in the laboratory. In optics, each element can be described by a Mueller matrix. Then, in the present work we tried to decompose the global measured matrix and to separate the interface matrix from the target matrix which is the one of interest. This paper shows it impossible to perform such a decomposition. We succeeded in reducing the interface effects without eliminating them entirely. So this paper focuses on finding a decomposition algorithm of a Mueller matrix to deduce the polarimetric type of a target whatever the interface state.