A Lensless Polarization Camera
This work addresses the need for compact and cost-effective polarization imaging systems for sensing and computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing lensless methods.
The authors tackled the problem of bulky and expensive polarization cameras by proposing a lensless design using a diffuser and striped polarization mask, recovering four linear polarization images from a single snapshot.
Polarization imaging is a technique that creates a pixel map of the polarization state in a scene. Although invisible to the human eye, polarization can assist various sensing and computer vision tasks. Existing polarization cameras use spatial or temporal multiplexing, which increases the camera volume, weight, cost, or all of the above. Recent lensless imaging approaches, such as DiffuserCam, have demonstrated that compact imaging systems can be realized by replacing the lens with a coding element and performing computational reconstruction. In this work, we propose a compact lensless polarization camera composed of a diffuser and a simple striped polarization mask. By combining this optical design with a reconstruction algorithm that explicitly models the polarization-encoded lensless measurements, four linear polarization images are recovered from a single snapshot. Our results demonstrate the potential of lensless approaches for polarization imaging and reveal the physical factors that govern reconstruction quality, guiding the development of high-quality practical systems.