Abstract
The human eye is effectively “polarization-blind”, i.e., it is only sensitive to the intensity and wavelength of optical waves, and encodes and maps these into the perceptual qualities of brightness and color. Polarization, the third characteristic of optical waves, however, has been shown to be an important information-carrying features of waves, and may reveal useful information about a scene such as local curvature, material contrast, surface shapes, and the relative direction of illumination [1]. Since the unaided human eye cannot sense the polarization of light, information collected by polarimetric imaging systems must be exh ibited as a set of cues visible to a human observer, preferably in a way that, by and large, preserves important non-polarization information such as that carried by the spectral and luminance distributions in the image. Effectively, some form of “sensory substitution” is required for presenting polarization “signals” to a “polarization-blind” observer, without affecting other visual information such as color and brightness.
© 2003 Optical Society of America
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