Analysis of polarization speckle for imaging through random birefringent scatterer

Abstract

Propagation of a coherent light through an anisotropic random medium generates randomly polarized field, known as polarization speckle. In this paper, an experimental technique is proposed and demonstrated to recover the transmittance of a polarized object from polarization speckle. Recovery of the polarized object from polarization speckle is made possible by combining the far-field intensity correlation of the object speckle with off-axis holography to determine the complex coherence function of the speckle. The desired object speckle which is uniformly polarized is filtered from the polarization speckle using a polarizer. The results are compared with the case where the complex coherence function is determined in the absence of the polarizer.