MPIG: Multi-angle Polarization Image Generation from a Single Polarization Observation

Overview & Synopsis

Polarization imaging provides informative cues for material analysis, scene understanding, and visual perception. However, acquiring complete polarization observations typically requires specialized hardware and multi-angle measurements, thereby increasing system complexity and limiting practical deployment. In this work, we address the problem of predicting the missing $45^\circ$, $90^\circ$, and $135^\circ$ polarization views from a single $0^\circ$ observation by leveraging a learned scene prior. To this end, we propose MPIG (Multi-angle Polarization Image Generation), a Swin Transformer-based framework that couples cross-angle feature interaction with residual decoding to predict angle-dependent intensity variations while preserving shared scene structure. Specifically, measured Stokes differences and polarization-strength-aware supervision guide the recovery of polarization modulation, orientation, and magnitude, while low-rank factorization further reduces the decoding cost. We also construct HighPol, a large-scale real-world polarization dataset comprising 5,474 groups of high-resolution four-angle polarization images collected from diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. Experimental results demonstrate improved image and polarization accuracy, achieving 29.729 dB PSNR, 0.9505 SSIM, and $21.514^\circ$ AoLP MAngE while requiring 85.86 M parameters and 1.126 T FLOPs. Furthermore, downstream validation on glass and semantic-segmentation tasks suggests that the generated polarization images can preserve task-relevant information, demonstrating the effectiveness of MPIG and the practical utility of predicted polarization observations for downstream vision applications.