The first polarization imaging systems were made with mechanical rotation of polarizer(s) and waveplate(s) between each frame. These systems are usually quite slow and very sensitive to motion of the scene between frames. We use a patented polarization filter based on ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLC) which dramatically reduces the time required to acquire the polarization frames. This architecture allows fast acquisition of four polarization frames that are later used to calculate the Stokes vector for each pixel of the image.

The critical point is to link the polarization raw frames to the Stokes parameters. We developed a calibration procedure to determine the calibration matrix that permits to calculate the four Stokes parameters for any incident polarization state, partial or total.