Gaze stabilization is an almost ubiquitous animal behaviour, one that is required to see the world clearly and without blur. Stomatopods, however, only fix their eyes on scenes or objects of interest occasionally. Almost uniquely among animals they explore their visual environment with a series pitch, yaw and torsional (roll) rotations of their eyes, where each eye may also move largely independently of the other. In this work, we demonstrate that the torsional rotations are used to actively enhance their ability to see the polarization of light. Both Gonodactylus smithii and Odontodactylus scyllarus rotate their eyes to align particular photoreceptors relative to the angle of polarization of a linearly polarized visual stimulus, thereby maximizing the polarization contrast between an object of interest and its background. This is the first documented example of any animal displaying dynamic polarization vision, in which the polarization information is actively maximized through rotational eye movements.

In recent years, the study of polarisation vision in animals has seen numerous breakthroughs, not just in terms of what is known about the function of this sensory ability, but also in the experimental methods by which polarisation can be controlled, presented and measured. Once thought to be limited to only a few animal species, polarisation sensitivity is now known to be widespread across many taxonomic groups, and advances in experimental techniques are, in part, responsible for these discoveries. Nevertheless, its study remains challenging, perhaps because of our own poor sensitivity to the polarisation of light, but equally as a result of the slow spread of new practices and methodological innovations within the field. In this review, we introduce the most important steps in designing and calibrating polarised stimuli, within the broader context of areas of current research and the applications of new techniques to key questions. Our aim is to provide a constructive guide to help researchers, particularly those with no background in the physics of polarisation, to design robust experiments that are free from confounding factors.

Stomatopods have an extraordinary visual system, incorporating independent movement of their eyes in all three degrees of rotational freedom. In this work, we demonstrate that in the peacock mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus scyllarus, the level of ocular independence is task dependent. During gaze stabilization in the context of optokinesis, there is weak but significant correlation between the left and right eyes in the yaw degree of rotational freedom, but not in pitch and torsion. When one eye is completely occluded, the uncovered eye does not drive the covered eye during gaze stabilization. However, occluding one eye does significantly affect the uncovered eye, lowering its gaze stabilization performance. There is a lateral asymmetry, with the magnitude of the effect depending on the eye (left or right) combined with the direction of motion of the visual field. In contrast, during a startle saccade, the uncovered eye does drive a covered eye. Such disparate levels of independence between the two eyes suggest that responses to individual visual tasks are likely to follow different neural pathways.

In addition to the visual information contained in intensity and color, imaging polarimetry allows visual information to be extracted from the polarization of light. However, a major challenge of imaging polarimetry is image degradation due to noise. This paper investigates the mitigation of noise through denoising algorithms and compares existing denoising algorithms with a new method, based on BM3D (Block Matching 3D). This algorithm, Polarization-BM3D (PBM3D), gives visual quality superior to the state of the art across all images and noise standard deviations tested. We show that denoising polarization images using PBM3D allows the degree of polarization to be more accurately calculated by comparing it with spectral polarimetry measurements.

The accuracy of calculations of both the degree and angle of polarization depend strongly on the noise in the measurements used. The noise in the measurements recorded by both camera based systems and spectrometers can lead to significant artefacts and incorrect conclusions about high degrees of polarization when in fact none exist. Three approaches are taken in this work: firstly, the absolute error introduced as a function of the signal to noise ratio for polarization measurements is quantified in detail. An important finding here is the reason for why several studies incorrectly suggest that black (low reflectivity) objects are highly polarized. The high degree of polarization is only an artefact of the noise in the calculation. Secondly, several simple steps to avoid such errors are suggested. Thirdly, if these points can not be followed, two methods are presented for mitigating the effects of noise: a maximum likelihood estimation method and a new denoising algorithm to best calculate the degree of polarization of natural polarization information.