Polarization vision for object detection

Polarization vision has recently been shown to simplify some important image understanding tasks that can be very difficult to perform with intensity vision. This, together with the more general capabilities of polarization vision for image understanding, motivates the building of camera sensors that automatically sense and process polarization information. Described in this paper is a design for a liquid crystal polarization camera sensor that has been built to automatically sense partially 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 directly related to sensed polarization. As the sensory input to polarization camera sensors subsumes that of standard intensity cameras, they can significantly expand the application potential of computer vision for object detection. A number of images taken with polarization cameras are presented showing potential applications to image understanding, object recognition, circuit board inspection, and marine biology.