Implementation of Real-Time Calibration of Polarization Imaging Sensors

Recent breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques have led to development of sophisticated Division-of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) polarization imaging sensors. One such technique allows the fabrication of nanowire filters fabricated directly on the imaging sensor itself. This technique can be used to fabricate robust DoFP polarization imaging sensors. However, the polarization information captured by the imagers can be degraded due to imperfections in the fabrication of the nanowire filters on the imaging sensor. Polarization information can also be degraded from other sources including crosstalk between pixels. To compensate for these undesired effects, a calibration routine can be applied to each pixel after image capture. In this project, we implement a calibration routine as a step in the pipeline processing of captured polarization images. The polarization image processing and calibration are implemented on an FPGA development board to achieve a real-time response to image captures