Organizations: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha, China · School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China
Abstract
Polarimetric imaging enables advanced vision applications such as normal estimation and de-reflection by capturing unique surface-material interactions. However, existing applications (alternatively called downstream tasks) rely on datasets constructed by naively regrouping raw measurements from division-of-focal-plane sensors, where pixels of the same polarization angle are extracted and aligned into sparse images without proper demosaicking. This reconstruction strategy results in suboptimal, incomplete targets that limit downstream performance. Moreover, current demosaicking methods are task-agnostic, optimizing only for photometric fidelity rather than utility in downstream tasks. Towards this end, we propose PolarAPP, the first framework to jointly optimize demosaicking and its downstream tasks. PolarAPP introduces a feature alignment mechanism that semantically aligns the representations of demosaicking and downstream networks via meta-learning, guiding the reconstruction to be task-aware. It further employs an equivalent imaging constraint for demosaicking training, enabling direct regression to physically meaningful outputs without relying on rearranged data. Finally, a task-refinement stage fine-tunes the task network using the stable demosaicking front-end to further enhance accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PolarAPP outperforms existing methods in both demosaicking quality and downstream performance. Code is available upon acceptance.
Polarimetric vision is gaining increasing attention because it provides physical cues about scene shape, material, and reflection that are difficult to recover from RGB alone. Recent work has therefore explored predicting polarization directly from conventional RGB images; however, the fidelity of these methods strongly depends on the polarization supervision used for training. Most existing datasets rely on Division-of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) cameras with four spatially interleaved analyzer orientations, which provide limited angular redundancy and introduce interpolation and instantaneous-field-of-view errors. We introduce DensePol, a high-redundancy RGB--polarization dataset based on Division-of-Time (DoT) acquisition, capturing 180 full-resolution analyzer orientations at 1∘ intervals. DensePol contains 2,018 paired RGB--polarization images with the angular measurements and fitting residuals retained. Dense angular sampling substantially improves polarization stability, reducing AoLP deviation from 13.36∘ to 2.21∘. We further introduce a deterministic diffusion-based RGB-to-polarization framework with cyclic AoLP representation and a local DoLP refiner. Experiments demonstrate improved polarization prediction and downstream surface-normal estimation. The dataset and code will be publicly available.
Color-polarization imaging using a color-polarization filter array (CPFA) sensor captures both texture (color intensity) and physical (polarization) information of the scene in a single shot, enabling various applications in computer vision. However, the raw mosaic output from a CPFA sensor often suffers from severe noise and resolution loss, especially under low-light conditions. Existing methods generally focus on either denoising or demosaicking tasks, failing to capture the coupling between them and neglecting shared low-level features. In this paper, we propose a color-polarization denoising and demosaicking network (CPDDNet), which is a joint framework that performs noise removal and CPFA interpolation using a feature fusion module that retains the features from the CPFA raw data at both the denoising and the demosaicking stages. Experimental results demonstrate that CPDDNet significantly enhances image quality and polarization parameter accuracy, outperforming existing approaches on a real dataset.
Polarimetric imaging captures surface polarization characteristics, such as the Degree of Linear Polarization (DoLP) and the Angle of Polarization (AoP). In mainstream Division of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) color polarization imaging, recovering polarization parameters from captured mosaic arrays remains a challenging inverse problem. Existing DoFP cameras also face hardware bottlenecks and often cannot support high-frame-rate acquisition, limiting polarimetric imaging in dynamic video tasks. These limitations motivate joint spatial and temporal enhancement. To this end, we propose the first space-time polarization video reconstruction architecture. The method jointly models polarization directions in space and time and uses a polarization-aware implicit neural representation for continuous, high-fidelity upsampling. By analyzing temporal variations in polarization parameters, we further introduce a flow-guided polarization variation loss to supervise polarization dynamics. We also establish the first large-scale color DoFP polarization video benchmark to support this research direction. Extensive experiments on this benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.