Design and performance analysis of infrared micro-polarizer array

This paper presents a design method of micro-polarizer array (MPA) placed in front of a focal plane imaging sensor to capture polarized images in the infrared spectrum. There are a number of possible configurations of micro-polarizers in an MPA according to the ways to calculate different Stokes vectors. This paper introduces a polarization frequency structure matrix since representations of MPA are crucial in demosaicking of polarized images. Experiments on small target detection using eight different MPA configurations showed that the MPA has a big impact on both objective and subjective quality of demosaicked images.