Salsa

Description

Salsa is being used in applications which require the detection of man-made objects in complex backgrounds, including military surveillance and remote sensing. This is because man-made objects generally have smooth surfaces which have a higher degree of polarization than natural objects. Degree of polarization imaging has been proved to be able to detect man made object in shadows

Salsa performs:

• Fast linear Stokes polarization imaging in the visible
• Passive and Active polarization imaging

Salsa enables:

• Linear Stokes Polarization Analysis
• Image contrast enhancement
• Imaging through canopies and shades
• Target Detection & Identification
• Complex 3D surface reconstruction

The first polarization imaging systems were made with mechanical rotation of polarizer(s) and waveplate(s) between each frame. Those systems are usually quite slow and very sensitive to motion of the scene between frames. Bossa Nova Vision use a patented polarization filter based on ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLC) which dramatically reduces the time required to acquire the polarization frames. This architecture allows fast acquisition of four polarization frames that are later used to calculate the Stokes vector for each pixel of the image.

The critical point is to link the polarization raw frames to the Stokes parameters. BNV developed a calibration procedure to determine the calibration matrix that permits to calculate the four Stokes parameters for any incident polarization state, partial or total.