Directly obtaining the polarization properties from measured Mueller matrices

Abstract

In this work, we present a new method that allows directly obtaining the polarization properties from measured macroscopic Mueller matrices without decomposition. The method is based on exploiting the fact that the canonical decomposition of a macroscopic Mueller matrix has only one unique form. Component matrices in canonical decomposition method are interpreted by using the relationships derived with the form of one possible product in polar decomposition. The macroscopic Mueller matrix with elements containing several polarization parameters is generally expressed as a product of the component matrices. Formulas are presented in terms of the elements of a measured macroscopic Mueller matrix for the parameters representing polarization and depolarization properties of a medium. Finally, theoretical validation of the Mueller matrix with known and unknown polarization properties is presented. The accuracy of this method is validated by analyzing the consistency between the results obtained by the proposed method and those obtained by the polar decomposition, in which the values of polarization effects are considered to be accurate with the fact that the correction matrices calculated by pseudopolar decomposition are all approximately to identity matrices. This method has the advantages of directly obtaining the polarization properties of the measured Mueller matrix without decomposition. As an example, the depth-resolved images of the polarization parameters of the biological tissue calculated with the measured Mueller matrix are presented to demonstrate the capability of our method.