Integrated diffractive full-Stokes spectro-polarimetric imaging

Spectro-polarimetric imaging provides multidimensional optical information acquisition capabilities, offering significant potential for diverse applications. Current spectro-polarimetric imaging systems typically suffer from large physical footprints, high design complexity, elevated costs, or the drawback of requiring the replacement of standard components with polarization optics. To address these issues, we propose an integrated diffractive full-Stokes spectro-polarimetric imaging framework that synergistically combines an end-to-end designed diffractive polarization spectral element (DPSE) with SPMSA-Net to demonstrate high-performance spectro-polarimetric imaging. The DPSE modulates the scene and generates modulated images carrying phase-encoding and polarization information. The modulated images are the input of the SPMSA-NET for the reconstruction of the spectro-polarimetric data cube. The framework achieves an average improvement of 0.78 dB in PSNR and 0.012 in SSIM over existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Based on this framework, our prototype system can simultaneously capture spectral information (400-700 nm) with 10 nm spectral resolution and full-Stokes parameters {<i>S</i>₁, <i>S</i>₂, <i>S</i>₃, <i>S</i>₄}. Meanwhile, the system provides a high spatial resolution of 2252 × 2252 pixels. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves high-fidelity spectral imaging (over 98.9% fidelity) and precise polarization characterization, with a compact architecture (modulation component of merely 2 mm thickness).