High Light Efficiency Spectral Polarization Imaging Method Based on Mach–Zehnder Structured Liquid Crystal Tunable Filters and Variable Retarders

Abstract

Liquid crystal tunable filters (LCTFs) are extensively used in hyperspectral imaging systems to obtain spectral information of target scenes. However, a typical LCTF can only filter linearly polarized light, greatly reducing the transmittance of the system and limiting its application in spectral and polarization imaging. In this paper, a spectropolarimeter using Mach–Zehnder structured LCTFs (MZ-LCTFs) combined with liquid crystal variable retarders (LCVRs) is proposed. The polarized beam splitter (PBS) can make full use of the two polarization components of the incident light to improve the transmittance of the system. Specifically, the results show that the mean pixel intensity (MPI) of spectral images is improved by 93.48% compared to a typical LCTF. Subsequently, the average signal to noise ratio (SNR) of filtered and unfiltered images when simultaneously using polarization S and P channels is increased by 2.59 dB compared to a single channel. In addition, the average Standard Deviations (STDs) of DoLP and DoCP are 0.016 and 0.018, respectively. The proposed method has the potential to be applied to obtain polarization information with high optical efficiency and a full spectrum in a wide band.