High contrast imaging: a new frontier for exoplanets search and characterization.

Although very successful (more than 350 planets discovered up to now), indirect methods for extrasolar planet detection (Radial velocities, transits) are sensitive to planets quite close to their hosts. Moreover, accurate studies of the planet characteristics are feasible only for a subset of objects which are strongly irradiated by their parent stars. High contrast imaging will be the new frontier of exoplanets search and characterization. This technique will provide the opportunity to have at once a deep glance in the neighborhood of the target star in a yet unexplored region of star-planet separation. The possibility to couple integral field spectrograph to extreme adaptive optics module at the focus of 8 m telescope class (SPHERE for VLT and GPI for south Gemini) and in future to ELTs (EPICS) gives also the possibility to have a first order characterization of the exoplanets themselves. Here we present the potentiality of the high contrast imaging with the detection and characterization capability of the new planet finder instruments comparing them with the RVs and transit methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]