We show the use of a simplified snapshot polarimetric camera along with an adaptive image processing for optimal detection of a polarized light beacon through fog. The adaptive representation is derived using theoretical noise analysis of the data at hand and is shown to be optimal in the Maximum likelihood sense. We report that the contrast enhancing optimal representation that depends on the background noise correlation differs in general from standard representations like polarimetric difference image or polarization filtered image. Lastly, we discuss a detection strategy to reduce the false positive counts