Portable PIMI polarization imaging device based on automatic polarization recognition

Abstract

This paper proposes a new portable polarization parametric indirect microscopy imaging without a liquid crystal (LC) retarder. The polarization was modulated by a polarizer automatically rotating when the camera took raw images sequentially. A specific mark tagged the polarization states of each camera’s snapshot in the optical illumination path. A computer vision portable polarization parametric indirect microscopy imagrecognition algorithm was developed to retrieve the unknown polarization states from each raw camera image to ensure that the right polarization modulation states were used in the PIMI processing algorithm. The system’s performance was verified by obtaining PIMI parametric images of human facial skin. The proposed method avoids the error problem caused by the LC modulator and significantly reduces the whole system’s cost.