Light Intensity Control Using Polaroids

In today’s era of illuminating devices, there are a wide variety of devices available in aesthetics but the none with variable intensity of light. Using the basic principle of polarization of light using a Polaroid filter or polarizer, the designing of a light intensity control was done. The polarizing angle of the filter decides the intensity of the light that would pass through the filters. According to the principle of propagation of light, the electric and magnetic vibrations of a light wave occur perpendicularly to each other. A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is known as unpolarized light. The light emitted by the sun, by a lamp or a tube light are all unpolarized light sources. The other kind of wave is a polarized wave. A Plane polarized light vibrates on only one plane. The process of transforming unpolarized light into the polarized light is known as polarization. Using the same principle and with the use of a LDR (light dependent resister) as a sensor to sense the intensity of the surrounding light and then rotate the polaroid filter sheets accordingly using a stepper motor for the required change in intensity. The sensing and sending of feedback and subsequent rotation of the Polaroid filter sheets would be automated by ATMEGA32 microcontroller and L293D. Keywords: Polaroids, LDR, Light Variation, ATMEGA32, L293D

Ellipsometry of thin films of biological objects under conditions of total internal reflection

An analysis of the ellipsometric parameters of the reflected light from the prism test material air system is carried out when circularly polarized light is incident on it under the conditions of the onset of the phenomenon of total internal reflection. At the onset of total internal reflection, the ellipsometry parameter shows high variability with the angle of incidence, in contrast to the parameter r0. It is shown that TIR occurs when the angle of incidence is not equal to the critical angle of the adjacent media for two different materials, these angles differ from each other. In the case of a film, the TIR phenomenon occurs at an angle equal to the critical angle at the prism-air interface and does not depend on the film material. The results obtained show the high efficiency of using the ellipsometric method together with circularly polarized incident radiation for diagnostics of thin films made of biological material.

Graphics processing unit-accelerated Monte Carlo simulation of polarized light in complex three-dimensional media

Significance: Monte Carlo (MC) methods have been applied for studying interactions between polarized light and biological tissues, but most existing MC codes supporting polarization modeling can only simulate homogeneous or multi-layered domains, resulting in approximations when handling realistic tissue structures. Aim: Over the past decade, the speed of MC simulations has seen dramatic improvement with massively-parallel computing techniques. Developing hardware-accelerated MC simulation algorithms that can accurately model polarized light inside 3-D heterogeneous tissues can greatly expand the utility of polarization in biophotonics applications. Approach: Here we report a highly efficient polarized MC algorithm capable of modeling arbitrarily complex media defined over a voxelated domain. Each voxel of the domain can be associated with spherical scatters of various radii and densities. The Stokes vector of each simulated photon packet is updated through photon propagation, creating spatially resolved polarization measurements over the detectors or domain surface. Results: We have implemented this algorithm in our widely disseminated MC simulator, Monte Carlo eXtreme (MCX). It is validated by comparing with a reference CPU-based simulator in both homogeneous and layered domains, showing excellent agreement and a 931-fold speedup. Conclusion: The polarization-enabled MCX (pMCX) offers biophotonics community an efficient tool to explore polarized light in bio-tissues, and is freely available at http://mcx.space/.

Interactions of Linearly Polarized and Unpolarized Light on Kiwifruit Using Aquaphotomics

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is an important tool for predicting the internal qualities of fruits. Using aquaphotomics, spectral changes between linearly polarized and unpolarized light were assessed on 200 commercially grown yellow-fleshed kiwifruit (Actinidia chinensis var. chinensis ‘Zesy002’). Measurements were performed on different configurations of unpeeled (intact) and peeled (cut) kiwifruit using a commercial handheld NIR instrument. Absorbance after applying standard normal variate (SNV) and second derivative Savitzky–Golay filters produced different spectral features for all configurations. An aquagram depicting all configurations suggests that linearly polarized light activated more free water states and unpolarized light activated more bound water states. At depth (≥1 mm), after several scattering events, all radiation is expected to be fully depolarized and interactions for incident polarized or unpolarized light will be similar, so any observed differences are attributable to the surface layers of the fruit. Aquagrams generated in terms of the fruit soluble solids content (SSC) were similar for all configurations, suggesting the SSC in fruit is not a contributing factor here.

Recognition of Bio-Structural Anisotropy by Polarization Resolved Imaging

In this paper, we develop a simple technique to identify material texture from far, by using polarization-resolved imaging. Such a technique can be easily implemented into industrial environments, where fast and cheap sensors are required. The technique has been applied to both isotropic references (Teflon bar) and anisotropic samples (wood). By studying the radiance of the samples illuminated by linearly polarized light, different and specific behaviours are identified for both isotropic and anisotropic samples, in terms of multipolar emission and linear dichroism, from which fibre orientation can be resolved.

Polarimetric Imaging in the Environment Containing Medium and Object

Polarimetric imaging has been studied and applied to the problem of visibility restoration in various scenarios such as haze, mist and underwater. Although studies have shown that under certain conditions, circular polarimetric imaging has certain advantages over linear polarimetric imaging, however, for a complex environment containing both scattering medium and object, the performance of linear and circular polarimetric imaging is affected by many factors. In this paper, the propagation of linear and circular polarized light in the scattering medium is theoretically analyzed, then the simulation experiments under different experimental conditions are carried out and the conclusions are summarized. In order to validate the simulation results, the measurement experiments are carried out in dynamic smoke scenarios with different smoke concentrations. The results show that, the propagation of the polarized light, especially the circular polarized light, is determined by medium conditions. Generally, both the linear and circular polarimetric imaging had an ability to reduce the image degradation caused by smoke, however, under some certain environment conditions, unlike the linear polarized channels, the difference between the orthogonal circular polarized channels may be approached or even reversed, which may limit the circular polarization-based difference imaging and visibility restoration performance.