Inspection of plant pathologies through pseudocolored images based on polarimetric basis

Abstract

The study of the interaction of biological tissue with polarized light leads to relevant information of physical properties (dichroism, retardance and depolarization) of samples. Polarimetric analysis of different characteristics in tissues is useful for applications such us tissue classification, contrast enhancement or pathology detection. By means of polarimetric imaging techniques we can characterize the polarimetric signature of biological samples in a noninvasive and nondestructive way. We have found that depolarization information is of special interest in turbid media such as plant tissue. In this manuscript we use polarimetric observables for plant inspection. In particular, we provide enhanced visualization of certain plant pathologies by constructing depolarization based pseudocolored images of pathological leaves where the pathological areas are revealed.