As a new type of imaging technology, polarization imaging technology not only has a great future within target detection, but also has unique applications in machine vision. As a natural extension to the well-known Optical Transfer Function for scalar imaging systems, we proposed a new concept referred to as Optical Transfer Matrix (OTM) to analyze the performance of polarization imaging systems. The approach of OTM describes the frequency transfer characteristic of the system for the Stokes parameters between the object plane and the image plane, revealing some distinct advantages. In this paper, we modulate the spatial frequency of the light source by means of sinusoidal grating patterns and calculate the OTM from the resulting images. We evaluate the performance of polarization imaging systems by analyzing the OTM. This provides technical support for the subsequent research on OTM.
As a method to analyze the performance of optical polarization imaging systems, Optical Transfer Matrix (OTM) enjoys some distinct advantages, such as more objective, more reliable, applicable to both small and large aberration optical systems. The OTM describes the spatial frequency transfer characteristic of the system for each Stokes parameter propagating from the object plane to the image plane. In this paper, we give a spatial frequency analysis of a polarization imaging system and use knife-edge method to characterize the OTM of polarization imaging systems. In the experiment, we detect the Stokes Parameters in each state under the illumination of six typical polarized states of spatially incoherent light, and we use the experimental results to calculate the OTM. As compared with the optical grating method, the knife-edge method can measure the OTM of polarization imaging system in real time. The performance of polarization imaging systems can be evaluated by analyzing the image with OTM. This provides technical support for the subsequent research on OTM.
Publisher’s Note: This paper, originally published on 13 September 2021, was replaced with a corrected/revised version on 27 September 2021. If you downloaded the original PDF but are unable to access the revision, please contact SPIE Digital Library Customer Service for assistance.
In this paper, we give a spatial frequency analysis of polarization imaging system and study the effects of rotational alignment errors of the polarizer from their ideal orientations. With the help of newly proposed Optical Transfer Matrix (OTM) for a diffraction-limited polarization imaging system, we investigate the effects of polarization-sensitive aberrations from the generalized pupil matrix at the exit pupil plane. Here, polarization aberrations stemming from the angular alignment errors of a linear polarizer has been demonstrated. The performance of a polarization imaging system with rotational alignment error has also been evaluated based on a cost function based on OTM.
In this paper, we revisit the role of polarization and coherence in the study of polarization speckle. It is shown that the type of polarization and coherence used in such analysis has an important difference from the "classical" polarization and coherence concepts. The analogy between polarization speckle and partially polarized thermal radiation is explored. We propose a concept referred to as ensemble-average polarization and coherence for statistical optics and give the definition and physical indication for polarization speckle. Some statistics associated with polarization speckle including the 1st order statistical statistics of the Stokes parameters and the ensemble-average Van Cittert-Zernike theorem for the ensembled-average generalized Stokes parameters are investigated theoretically and experimentally to demonstrate their link and different physical features as compared with the conventional concepts.
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