Nonseparable modulation strategy for channeled spatiotemporal Stokes polarimeters.

Abstract

Spatiotemporally modulated polarimeters have shown promising imaging performance by leveraging the tradeoff between spatial bandwidth and temporal bandwidth to outperform polarimeters that use spatial or temporal modulation alone. However, the existing separable modulation strategy, in which the spatial carriers are generated independently from the temporal carriers, makes such devices sensitive to the systematic errors of the rotation element inevitably. In this paper, we propose two novel strategies that have spatiotemporal modulation that is inherently mixed. The method enables different elements of the Mueller matrix to be used to create the carriers, reducing the effects of systematic errors in different ways. We present the indepth comparison of the channel structure and the reconstruction accuracy of each modulation strategy in various bandwidth scenarios under the presence of systematic error. Simulation results show that the nonseparable modulation can provide higher reconstruction accuracy of polarimetric information as compared to the separable strategy.