Analyzing microtextured regions of optically anisotropic materials

A system comprising:

• a light source for emitting substantially monochromatic light;
• a fixed polarizer having a first polarization axis, the linear polarizer for receiving the emitted light and producing a polarized light from the received light;
• a beam splitter for receiving the polarized light and redirecting the received light to a half-wave plate;
• an objective lens for receiving the redirected light from the half-wave plate and focusing the redirected light onto a sample, the sample having an optical anisotropy, the objective lens further for receiving a reflected light from the sample and propagating the reflected light to the half-wave plate and the beam splitter, the reflected light being a function of the optical anisotropy;
• an analyzer having a second polarization axis, the second polarization axis being generally orthogonal to the first polarization axis, the analyzer for receiving the propagated reflected light from the beam splitter and producing a partially extinguished light, the partially extinguished light being a function of the first polarization axis, the second polarization axis, and the optical anisotropy of the sample;
• a camera to capture an image sequence of the partially extinguished light;
• and
• a processing system for:
• flat-field correcting the captured image sequence;
• performing image rotation and image registration;
• extracting an intensity response at each pixel of the captured image;
• extracting an amplitude value for the intensity response at each pixel of the captured image sequence;
• extracting a phase value for the intensity response at each pixel of the captured image sequence;
• correlating the amplitude with an inclination of an optic axis;
• correlating the phase with an azimuth of the optic axis;
• and
• quantifying microstructured regions (MTRs) using the inclination and azimuth.