The interferometry technique is commonly used to obtain the phase information of an object in optical metrology. The obtained wrapped phase is subject to a 2π ambiguity. To remove the ambiguity and obtain the correct phase, phase unwrapping is essential. Conventional phase unwrapping approaches are time-consuming and noise sensitive. To address those issues, we propose a new approach, where we transfer the task of phase unwrapping into a multi-class classification problem and introduce an efficient segmentation network to identify classes. Moreover, a noise-to-noise denoised network is integrated to preprocess noisy wrapped phase. We have demonstrated the proposed method with simulated data and in a real interferometric system.

Division of focal plane (DoFP) polarimeters operate by integrating micro-polarizer elements with a focal plane. These polarization imaging sensors reduce spatial resolution output and each pixel has a varying instantaneous field of view (IFoV). These drawbacks can be mitigated by applying proper interpolation methods. In this paper, we present a new interpolation method for DoFP polarimeters by using intensity correlation. We employ the correlation of intensity measurements in different orientations to detect edges and then implement interpolation along edges. The performance of the proposed method is compared with several previous methods by using root mean square error (RMSE) comparison and visual comparison. Experimental results showed that our proposed method can achieve better visual effects and a lower RMSE than other methods.

We propose a polarization demosaicing convolutional neural network to address the image demosaicing issue, the last unsolved issue in microgrid polarimeters. This network learns an end-to-end mapping between the mosaic images and full-resolution ones. Skip connections and customized loss function are used to boost the performance. Experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in terms of quantitative measures and visual quality.

Image fusion is the key step to improve the performance of object detection in polarization images. We propose an unsupervised deep network to address the polarization image fusion issue. The network learns end-to-end mapping for fused images from intensity and degree of linear polarization images, without the ground truth of fused images. Customized architecture and loss function are designed to boost performance. Experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative measurement.

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) real-time imaging is especially important for disaster emergencies and real-time monitoring applications with highly desired real-time requirements. Therefore, the continuous improvement of real-time imaging efficiency is an important development trend. At present, traditional real-time imaging algorithms based on constant pulse repetition frequency (PRF) have low accuracy when processing spaceborne SAR data with nonlinear trajectory. For this problem, the existing methods usually introduce some complex signal processing steps, such as scaling or interpolation processing, to improve the accuracy of the real-time imaging, but this will reduce its efficiency. Therefore, this article proposes a new real-time imaging algorithm based on variable PRF for nonlinear trajectory spaceborne SAR. By introducing the variable PRF, the proposed algorithm is equivalent to complete the complex signal processing steps in the radar signal transmission stage, which can greatly improve the efficiency of real-time imaging. Simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Division of focal plane (DoFP) polarization image sensors capture polarization properties of light at every imaging frame. However, these imaging sensors capture only partial polarization information, resulting in reduced spatial resolution output and a varying instantaneous field of overview (IFoV). Interpolation methods are used to reduce the drawbacks and recover the missing polarization information. In this paper, we propose residual interpolation as an alternative to normal interpolation for division of focal plane polarization image sensors, where the residual is the difference between an observed and a tentatively estimated pixel value. Our results validate that our proposed algorithm using residual interpolation can give state-of-the-art performance over several previously published interpolation methods, namely bilinear, bicubic, spline and gradient-based interpolation. Visual image evaluation as well as mean square error analysis is applied to test images. For an outdoor polarized image of a car, residual interpolation has less mean square error and better visual evaluation results.