Compressive spectral polarization imaging

Abstract

We present a compressive spectral polarization imager driven by a rotating prism and a colored detector with a micropolarizer array. The prism which shears the scene along one spatial axis according to its wavelength components is successively rotated to different angles as measurement shots are taken. With 0°, 45°, 90°, 135° linear micropolarizers randomly distributed, the micropolarizer array is matched to the detector thus the the first three Stokes parameters of the scene are compressively sensed. The four dimensional (4D) data cube is thus projected onto the two dimensional (2D) FPA. Multiple snapshots are obtained for scenes with detailed spatial and spectral content. The 4D spectral-polarization data cube is reconstructed from the 2D measurements via nonlinear optimization with sparsity constraints. Polarization state planes (degree of linear polarization and angle of polarization) for each spectral slice of the hypercube are presented.