EXPERIMENTAL CHARACTERIZATION OF IMMERSED TARGETS BY POLAR DECOMPOSITION OF THE MUELLER MATRICES

The possibility of characterizing immersed targets in laboratory condi tions, whatever the water surface roughness is discussed in this paper . The first idea Tvas to reduce the interface effects or better to sup press them within the analysis. We used the Mueller formalism to chara cterize targets in the laboratory. In optics, each element can be desc ribed by a Mueller matrix. Then, in the present work rye tried to deco mpose the global measured matrix and to separate the inter face matrix from the target matrix which is the one of interest. This paper shows it impossible to perform such a decomposition. We succeeded in reduci ng the interface effects without eliminating them entirely. So this pa per focuses on finding a decomposition algorithm of a Mueller matrix t o deduce the polarimetric type of a target whatever the interface stat e.