Drone polariscopy - towards remote sensing applications

Remote sensing is critical for a wide range of applications, including ocean and wave monitoring, planetary exploration, agriculture, and astronomy. We demonstrated a polariscopy concept which is able to determine orientation of patterns below the optical resolution limit of a system. This technique relies on measuring at least 4 different polarisation angles and calculating the orientation from the set of intensity information. It was initially demonstrated on the infrared microspectroscopy beamline at the Australian Synchrotron using IR light in transmission. Using a Thorlabs CS505MUP monochrome polarising camera, it was shown that it also worked in optical transmission. This camera was mounted onto a drone as a remote sensing platform and orientation information was extracted from reflection images taken at an altitude where conventional imaging could not resolve the test patterns. In the interest of moving towards high-speed data acquisition and processing, two methods for processing the image are compared.