Polarization detection of marine targets covered in glint

Glint is the strong noise in the marine targets detection and it must be reduced. The traditional method that deploys one parallel line polarizer can only suppress the s-component of the glint. And the effectiveness of suppressing is due to the geometry of the sun and the detector. So the traditional method can only be used in few scenario. A new imaging system mounted two line polarizers was developed on the foundation of the theoretically analyzing the polarization characters of glint and marine targets. The experiment results show that under the condition of the non-Brewster angle specular reflection, while zenith angle of the light source and the imaging system without polarizer are 65, the contrast of the target image is 0.05. When the imaging system is mounted with only one parallel polarizer the contrast is 0.45, while mounted with two line polarizers which the angle between the two polarization directions is 45 the contrast is 0.9, and which the angle is 75 the contrast is 0.41. So the imaging system with two line polarizers which have reasonable design of polarization direction can effectively suppress glint interference, improve the contrast between the target and the background, which can improve the effect of marine targets detection covered in glint.