Polarization radiometric calibration method for multichannel polarization camera

In the field of space remote sensing, multichannel polarization camera, which records the radiance of the transmitted light at several specific angles simultaneously, plays a significant role. However, the nonuniform response among different channels will lead to measurement error. Since the polarization parameters of polarization elements are ignored in traditional radiometric calibration, so for multichannel polarization camera, the traditional calibration is not suitable. To cope with this issue, a polarimetric calibration will be introduced below. In this paper a polarization radiometric calibration method for a multichannel polarization camera is presented. A polarization radiometric calibration model is proposed in this paper to analytically describe the responses of digital number of the detector to the radiance of the incident light and the polarization parameters of polarization elements. Through a verification experiment, the polarization parameters and polarization radiometric calibration coefficients of a simulated polarization camera were obtained rapidly. Results of the experiment indicates that the accuracy of the final calibration is 0.8% at 670 nm. The proposed polarization radiometric calibration method can be used in the calibration of the multichannel polarization camera and satisfy the requirements of the existing polarization remote sensing detection.