Light consists of orthogonal electric and magnetic fields. Most natural light is unpolarised and so consists of randomly fluctuating field directions. However, a range of natural phenomena (e.g. scattering and reflection) and human inventions (e.g. polarising filters and liquid crystal displays) cause the light to become polarised. That is, the electric and magnetic fields become confined to specific planes or get constrained in other ways. In the field of Computer Vision, both natural and artificially

generated polarised light has been utilised for a range of applications including specularity reduction, shape recovery, reflectance analysis, image enhancement and segmentation and separation of reflectance components.

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Research into shape-from-polarisation involves extracting polarisation data from a scene and using it to extract geometrical information about a scene. My device can be used to capture a full polarisation image and combine data from two light sources.