Scenes containing laser illumination are commonly encountered in a variety of remote-sensing applications. One aspect of laser illumination is that it can interfere with electronic image acquisition, especially if it is modulated at temporal frequencies close to the frame rate of the sensing system, or at harmonics or subharmonics of the frame rate. A quantitative measure of this aliasing interference is developed and used to characterize the robustness of the image acquisition and variation of tracker line of sight under various illumination scenarios. A second aspect of laser illumination is that objects present in the scene reflect some flux back to the sensor, often with a change in the polarization characteristics of the radiation. The fact that this change in polarization is a function of the material composition and geometrical configuration of an object can be used to develop discrimination techniques and criteria used to decide the presence or absence of certain classes of objects in the scene, toward the goal of developing an object-classification capability against competing background clutter. From this perspective, polarization characteristics of a number of commonly encountered objects are measured, such as prisms, corner cube reflectors, retroreflective tape, and liquid crystal light modulators that are typically used as laser beam steerers. Laser-based measurements were performed at various angles of incidence, and for the liquid crystals, also as a function of applied voltage. The acquired data sets for these objects are presented in terms of the Mueller matrix. This formalism connects the input and output Stokes vectors, thus providing a complete polarization signature of each object at the measurement wavelength. We discuss our measured results in the context of previous literature references, for purposes of comparison and cross-validation. Especially for the case of reflection measurements on the liquid crystal light modulators, we believe that the Mueller matrix data sets presented are new contributions to the literature.