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News Release
Researchers receive funding for exploitation of polarimetric imagery
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has awarded an additional $136,938 to electrical and computer engineering associate professors Charles Creusere and David Voelz. The total funding for their project is $410,813. The goal of this project is to develop tools and techniques to facilitate the exploitation of polarimetric imagery (especially passively-gathered imagery) for the purposes of materials classification and object detection/identification. Their approach in doing this is to assume an underlying pBRDF (polarimetric Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) model based on micro-facets for the specular component of the polarimetric signature. Using this model along with powerful nonlinear optimization techniques, they have shown that we can estimate object signatures in the form of the complex index of refractions and the surface normal angles that are invariant to position of the illumination source. Being able to extract such invariant features is the key to developing robust object and material detection and classification algorithms.