  Active polarimetric imagery is a powerful tool for accessing the information
present in a scene. Indeed, the polarimetric images obtained can reveal
polarizing properties of the objects that are not avalaible using conventional
imaging systems. However, when coherent light is used to illuminate the scene,
the images are degraded by speckle noise. The polarization properties of a
scene are characterized by the degree of polarization. In standard polarimetric
imagery system, four intensity images are needed to estimate this degree . If
we assume the uncorrelation of the measurements, this number can be decreased
to two images using the Orthogonal State Contrast Image (OSCI). However, this
approach appears too restrictive in some cases. We thus propose in this paper a
new statistical parametric method to estimate the degree of polarization
assuming correlated measurements with only two intensity images. The estimators
obtained from four images, from the OSCI and from the proposed method, are
compared using simulated polarimetric data degraded by speckle noise.
