Design and Analysis of a Novel Compact and Simultaneous Polarimeter for Complete Stokes Polarization Imaging with a Piece of Encoded Birefringent Crystal and a Micropolarizer Array

We report a compact and simultaneous polarimeter for complete Stokes polarization imaging by using an encoded birefringent crystal (EBC), a micropolarizer array, and a camera, without any mechanical movements, electrical signal modulation, and complex configuration. The EBC is made of a thin piece of birefringent crystal, and is composed of identical units that have been encoded by different thickness at four neighboring pixels. Different with previous methods, this new design takes advantage of different retardances with different thickness and derives the state of polarization of the incident beam from the camera image. We have optimized the proposed configurations for minimizing the error propagation, and the numerical analysis results show that the proposed method has a good performance for complete Stokes polarization imaging. From the analysis results, a relax tolerance for systematic errors including fabrication and integration of EBC and MPA, and the incident wavelength greatly reduce the machining and integration difficulty, and the cost. The presented polarimeter for polarization imaging with complete Stokes components has several advantages including compactness, environment stability, accuracy, instantaneity, not complicated configuration, user-friendly and low cost, and it is expected to be of potential use in a variety of applications.