Polarization based removal of spurious inter-reflections in active ranging

We report an initial experimental study investigating how polarization analysis can improve the robustness of triangulation-based laser scanners. In particular, we disambiguate the true laser stripe from spurious inter-reflections caused by holes and concavities on metal surfaces by projecting linearly polarised laser light and measuring the polarization state of the linearly polarized component of the reflected light. This takes polarization vision into range sensing, adding, to our best knowledge, a new application to those already explored.