Combining light polarization and speckle measurements with multivariate analysis to predict bulk optical properties of turbid media

This study aims to investigate the combination of speckle pattern analysis, polarization parameters, and chemometric tools to predict the optical absorption and scattering properties of materials. For this purpose, an optical setup based on light polarization and speckle measurements was developed, and turbid samples were measured at 405 and 660 nm. First, a backscattered polarized speckle acquisition was performed on a set of 41 samples with various scattering (μs) and absorbing (μa) coefficients. Then, several parameters were computed from the polarized speckle images, and prediction models were built using stepwise multiple linear regression. For scattering media, μs was predicted with R2=0.9 using two parameters. In the case of scattering and absorbing media, prediction results using two parameters were R2=0.62 for μs and R2=0.8 for μa. The overall results obtained in this research showed that the combination of speckle pattern analysis, polarization parameters, and chemometric tools to predict the optical bulk properties of materials show interesting promise.