| Polarization helps to improve target constrast, provide surface orientation and roughnes information, and obtain the micro-physical characteristics when used as the optical probe. Since conventional detector is insensitive to polarization information, it is the only means to measure polarization information that the intensity which polarization information is modulated into in time, space or spectrum domain is measured to reconstruct polarization parameters of the incident light.This paper almostly aimed at the investigation of polarimeter and polarimetric imaging system. A new method measuring the polarization state of light, which was based on the signal processing theory, was proposed to overcome the shotcoming of the conventional measurement method. According to the modulation domain, Stokes polarimeters were classified as tempral, spatial and spectral modulation polarimeters. Three new polarimeters were expressed to prove the proposed measurement method was correct and had the generality.The impact of orientation error of the retarder in rotatable retarder Stokes polarimeter on reconstructing Stokes parameters was studied as one of important error sources. We separated the intensity resulted from this error from the objective intensity through Taylor-series expansion, then derived the error transfer matrix transferring this error into Stokes parameter error via matrix transformation and strictly deriving. Ultimately, we obtained the analytical expressions of the Stokes parameter errors arised from the retarder orientation error. Based on these analytical expressions, it is easy to estimate the Stokes parameter errors and acquire the optimal system configuration for any incident polarization state. Aiming at the question that data processing for sequential in time polarimeters based on the data redunction matrix technique yield polarization artifacts, inverse Fourier transformation reconstruction technique was suggested to reconstruct the incident polarization parameter to overcome these artifacts, and the relationships between sampling frequency and system cutoff frequency was investigated in detail.Moreover, non-polarization optics still has polarization effect on the beam. To study the polarization effect of non-polarization optics, the means that connects Jones matrix with coherence matrix was used to analyze the effect of the polarization degree of prepositive optics system on polarimetric precision in CAPI. And, through optimizing orientations of these three polarizers in CAPI, SNR of the implement was progressed by about 10%. Finally, the calibration means of CAPI was illustrated in detail. |
