Polarization measurement accuracy analysis and improvement methods for the directional polarimetric camera

The directional polarimetric camera (DPC) is a remote-sensing instrument for the characterization of atmospheric aerosols and clouds by simultaneously conducting spectral, angular, and polarimetric measurements. Polarization measurement accuracy is an important index to evaluate the performance of the DPC and mainly related to the calibration accuracy of instrumental parameters. In this paper, firstly, the relationship between the polarization measurement accuracy of DPC and the parameter calibration errors caused by the nonideality of the components of DPC are analyzed, and the maximum polarization measurement error of DPC in the central field of view and edge field of view after initial calibration is evaluated respectively. Secondly, on the basis of the radiometric calibration of the DPC onboard the GaoFen-5 satellite in an early companion paper [Opt. Express2813187 (2020)10.1364/OE.391078], a series of simple and practical methods are proposed to improve the calibration accuracy of the parameters-the diattenuation of the optics, absolute azimuth angle, and relative transmission corresponding to each pixel, thereby improving the polarization measurement accuracy of DPC. The calibration results show that, compared with the original methods, the accuracy of the diattenuation of the optics, relative azimuth angle, and relative transmission of three polarized channels obtained with the improved methods are improved from ±1%, 0.1 degree and ±2% to ±0.4%, 0.05 degree and ±0.2%, respectively. Finally, two verification experiments based on a non-polarized radiation source and a polarizing system were carried out in the laboratory respectively to verify the improvement of the parameters modified by the proposed methods on the polarization measurement accuracy of the DPC to be boarding the GaoFen-5 (02) satellite. The experimental results show that when the corrected parameters were employed, the average error in measuring the degree of linear polarization of non-polarized light source for all pixels in the three polarized bands and the maximum deviation of the degree of linear polarization between the values set by the polarizing system and the values measured by the DPC at several different field of view angles for each polarized spectral band are obviously reduced. Both the mean absolute errors and the root mean square errors of the degree of linear polarization obtained with the corrected parameters are much lower than those obtained with the original parameters. All of these prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods.