Liquid crystal polarization camera

Presents a fully automated system which unites CCD camera technology with liquid crystal technology to create a polarization camera capable of sensing the polarization of reflected light from objects at pixel resolution. As polarization affords a more general physical description of light than does intensity, it can therefore provide a richer set of descriptive physical constraints for the understanding of images. The authors present a scheme for mapping polarization states into hue, saturation and intensity which is a very convenient representation for a polarization image. The polarization camera outputs such a color image which can then be used in polarization-based vision methods. The unique vision understanding capabilities of the polarization camera system are demonstrated with experimental results showing polarization-based dielectric/metal material classification, specular reflection and occluding contour segmentations in a fairly complex scene, and surface orientation constraints for object recognition