Systematical and universal calibration scheme for division-of-aperture polarimetric camera

Abstract

Division-of-aperture polarimetric (DoAP) camera has been widely used to obtain polarization images of scene owing to its feature in simultaneous acquisition of polarization information, real-time measurement and compact system. However, practical applications of DoAP imaging inevitably involve calibrating the camera from several aspects, which is very essential but the related reports are relatively lacking in current research. In this paper, we proposed a systematical and universal calibration scheme for the DoAP camera, which includes the lens distortion correction, the image registration, the polarization channel calibration and the Stokes parameters modification. Accordingly, a software for calibration and imaging processing, which consists of four modules, is designed to collectively facilitate the efficient and accurate execution of all calibration steps. In order to achieve real-time polarimetric imaging, the lens distortion correction and the image registration were done by means of lookup tables. Experimental results by using a full-Stokes DoAP camera we fabricated indicate that, via the lens distortion correction and the image registration, the alignment error between two images with a mean absolute error (MAE) less than 0.16 pixels can be obtained, resulting in the aligned images having an average increase of 64.53 % for the structural similarity index (SSIM) and that of 84.97 % for the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), respectively; and further via the polarization channel calibration and the Stokes parameters modification, the MAE of 0.0146 for the degree of polarization (DoP) and that of 0.3544° for the angle of polarization (AoP) are obtained, respectively. This proposed calibration scheme for DoAP camera is systematic, automatic and robust, which is benefit of improving the polarization detection accuracy, enhancing the camera calibration efficiency and thus promoting its polarimetric imaging performance.