Spectropolarimetric imaging for skin characteristics analysis

Light scattering spectra and polarization states can provide important information about skin. To analyse the mechanisms of interaction between skin and light, and the relationship between the changes of light's characteristics and the variations of skin's states, a spectropolarimetric imaging system is proposed to acquire the spectral, polarimetric and spatial properties of the skin. After acquiring the spectropolarimetric imagery, an empirical line correction method is used to analyse the polarimetric spectra differences between normal skin and skin with a chicken pox scar. To enhance the visual difference between normal skin and skin with a chicken pox scar, and the polarimetric and spectral characteristics of the skin in different states, a false colour mapping based spectropolarimetric image fusion method is proposed that combines the intensity image, the degree of linearity of the polarization image, and the phase of the polarization image, with spectral imagery. We demonstrate experimentally that this imaging system can be used to discriminate between the different skin pathological conditions efficiently.