Estimation of Mueller matrices using non-local means filtering

This article addresses the estimation of polarization signatures in the Mueller imaging framework by non-local means filtering. This is an extension of previous work dealing with Stokes signatures. The extension is not straightforward because of the gap in complexity between the Mueller framework and the Stokes framework. The estimation procedure relies on the Cholesky decomposition of the coherency matrix, thereby ensuring the physical admissibility of the estimate. We propose an original parameterization of the boundary of the set of Mueller matrices, which makes our approach possible. The proposed method is fully unsupervised. It allows noise removal and the preservation of edges. Applications to synthetic as well as real data are presented. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America