Impact of CCD camera SNR on polarimetric accuracy

A comprehensive charge-coupled device (CCD) camera noise model is employed to study the impact of CCD camera signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on polarimetric accuracy. The study shows that the standard deviations of the measured degree of linear polarization (DoLP) and angle of linear polarization (AoLP) are mainly dependent on the camera SNR. With increase in the camera SNR, both the measurement errors and the standard deviations caused by the CCD camera noise decrease. When the DoLP of the incident light is smaller than 0.1, the camera SNR should be at least 75 to achieve a measurement error of less than 0.01. When the input DoLP is larger than 0.5, a SNR of 15 is sufficient to achieve the same measurement accuracy. An experiment is carried out to verify the simulation results.