Performance bounds for the estimation of the degree of polarization from various sensing modalities

Performance bounds (Cramer-Rao bounds on root-mean-square errors) are computed for the estimation of the degree of polarization for reflected fields with active laser illumination [Proc. SPIE 5888, 58880N (2005)]. The bounds are computed from various sensing modalities, which involves the measurement and processing of (1) the four intensities outputs of a four-channel polarimeter, (2) the intensities of two orthogonal field components, and (3) the total intensity of the field. Each modality includes detector noise models and utilizes realistic data-collection models. © 2010 Optical Society of America