POLARIZATION CAMERA SENSORS

Recently, polarization vision has been shown to simplify some importan t image understanding tasks that can be more difficult to perform with intensity vision alone. This, together with the more general capabili ties of polarization vision for image understanding, motivates the sen sors that automatically sense and information. Described in this paper are a variety of designs for polarization camera sensors that have be en built to automatically sense partial linearly polarized light, and computationally process this sensed polarization information at pixel resolution to produce a visualization of reflected polarization from a scene, and/or a visualization of physical information in a scene dire ctly related to sensed polarization. The three designs for polarizatio n camera sensors presented utilize (i) serial acquisition of polarizat ion components using liquid crystals, (ii) parallel acquisition of pol arization components using a stereo pair of cameras and a polarizing b eamsplitter, and (iii) a prototype photosensing chip with three scanli nes, each scanline coated with a particular orientation of polarizing material. As the sensory input to polarization camera sensors subsumes that of standard intensity cameras, they can potentially significantl y expand the application potential of computer vision. A number of ima ges taken with polarization cameras are presented, showing potential a pplications to image understanding, object recognition, circuit board inspection and marine biology.