Improved atmospheric effects elimination method for pBRDF models of painted surfaces

A method for eliminating atmospheric effects in polarimetric imaging remote sensing detection was developed by combining the shadowing method and radiative transfer (RT) model. First, a polarized bidirectional reflectance distribution function (pBRDF) model of painted surfaces was constructed. Using the resulting polarimetric radiance composition, the atmospheric effects elimination method was developed and compared to Shell's method. Experiments were performed using a liquid-crystal-variable-retarder-based imaging polarimeter to obtain the surface pBRDFs. The proposed method showed better performance under different weather conditions than Shell's method. Furthermore, the error was below 4.8% in the proposed method (6.8% in Shell's method), indicating improved quantitative accuracy of the target physical parameters in remote sensing.