Active polarization imaging system to discriminate adaptively with diagonal Mueller matrix

•The system can adaptively discriminate the different material with the polarization feature.•The SVM is applied in the system which has a very strong ability of classification.•The training phase is simplified with only three elements of Mueller matrix.

A promising method to optimize the polarization state of two-channel active polarization imaging system is presented. In this method, it is seminal that the detecting function of the imaging system is regarded as a discriminant projection of the observed objects’ polarization features (elements of the Mueller matrix). The polarization state can be seen as a physical classifier which can be obtained by training samples. The image acquired with the system that has the designed optimal polarization state become discriminative results directly. The effectiveness of the proposed method and the discriminative ability of the optimal polarization state are demonstrated by the experimental results.