Polarimetric Spatio-Temporal Light Transport Probing

Abstract

Fig. 1. We propose a computational light transport probingmethod that decomposes transport into full polarization, spatial and temporal dimensions.Wemodel this multi-dimensional light transport as a tensor and analyze low-rank structure in the polarization domain which is exploited by our polarimetric probing method. We instantiate our approach with two imaging systems for spatio-polarimetric and coaxial temporal-polarimetric capture. (a)&(d) Conventional intensity imagers integrate incident light intensity over space and time independently of the polarization states of light, losing geometric and material information encoded in the polarimetric transport. Capturing polarization-resolved spatial transport components of (b) epipolar and (c) non-epipolar dimensions enable fine-grained decomposition of light transport. Combining temporal and polarimetric dimensions, we separate (e) geometry-dependent reflections and (f) direct/indirect reflections that cannot be resolved in the temporal-only measurements.