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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization

detection and calibration
Ye Yu , Yangan Zhang, Xueguang Yuan, Qingxiang Hou
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), P.O. Box 66 (BUPT),
Beijing 100876, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A rapid real-time polarization measurement system was designed and implemented in this paper. The
Received 16 May 2013 system is centered round a computer running application developed for the purpose. The paper illustrates
Accepted 13 October 2013 how to build such an excellent application with National Instruments graphical programming language
Available online xxx
LabVIEW, a synchronized high speed multi-channels data acquisition card and some photoelectric con-
version module in detail. With simple and friendly user interface, the experimental result shows that the
Keywords:
measurement system has high computational efciency, high precision calibration matrix, which can be
Optical communication
efciently utilized in experiments relating to the measurement of polarization.
Polarization measurement
Calibration matrix 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
LabVIEW

1. Introduction
With the increasing ber optical transmission rate, the adverse
effects brought by the polarization characteristics of light, such as
polarization mode dispersion, polarization state instability become
a crucial factor to affect the high-speed optical ber communication
transmission quality [1]. Polarization mode dispersion compensa-
tion is mainly controlled by a feedback system, in which the control
and detection of the polarization state is its core technology. And
early in coherent optical communication, the received optical sig-
nals are required to maintain the same polarization state with the
local laser. Since the state of polarization of optical signal in a ber
will vary randomly due to the degradations during transmission
of the signals, the phenomenon would be harmful to the coherent
detection of multilevel phase modulation formats, how to quickly
and accurately measure the changes in the polarization states of
light becomes critical.
Most of the existing polarizations measuring methods only focus
on the design and analysis of the optical domain, lacking fast conve-
nient hardware design and feature-rich highly scalable software. In
this paper, a technique of synchronized high-speed data acquisition
for multi-channels and fast graphics display of the gathered data is
introduced, which has already applied into practice. The system
developed here, using National Instruments LabVIEW graphical
programming language, has a more user friendly interface. It sepa-
rates the data acquisition, processing, loading, and saving operation
Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 010 61198086.
E-mail address: cuteyuye@bupt.edu.cn (Y. Yu).
which brings several benets to the user, namely the possibility of
storing the gathered data for future analysis and the modication of
the processing done without the need to gather new data. By using
Matlab Script and graphic display function (CW Graph 3D), the data
analysis and SOP (state of polarization) display have proved that
the system developed by us can meet the demand of high accuracy
and fast detection in the real-time measurement of the polarization
state.
2. Conguration and calibration of the polarimeter
2.1. Conguration of polarimeter
Polarimeter is widely used in many experiments and appli-
cations related to polarization characterization. The polarimeter
used in our measurement system was optimized via a redesign of
the amplication circuit part of General Photonics Corporations
in-line high speed polarimeter (PolaDetect POD-001), which has
a faster response and higher accuracy. It includes four photode-
tectors which outputs four photovoltages (or photocurrents) for
calculating both the state of polarization (SOP) and the degree of
polarization (DOP) of the light passing through the device.
As illustrated in Fig. 1 the polarimeter consists of two main
parts (in the dashed box): the optical module and the electronic
preamplier board [2].
When optical signals pass through the polarimeter, four pho-
todetectors in optical module output four weak photovoltages, then
an high speed analog-to-digital converter card (A/D card) convert
the analog output signals into digital signals so that a computer or

0030-4026/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079

Please cite this article in press as: Y. Yu, et al., A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization detection and calibration, Optik
- Int. J. Light Electron Opt. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079
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Fig. 1. Sketch of the polarimeter.

microprocessor can be used to calculate the SOP and DOP of the

input light using the following formula:

S0 m11 m12 m13 m14 V1

S1 m m22 m23 m24 V2
= MV = 21 (1)
S m
2 31 m32 m33 m34 V3
S3 m41 m42 m43 m44 V4

 Fig. 3. Experimental setup for calibrating the matrix of polarimeter.

S12 + S22 + S32
DOP =
S0
where V1 , V2 , V3 , and V4 are the photovoltages derived from the four
photodetectors. With the 4 4 calibration matrix M, the calculated
stokes parameter (S0 , S1 , S3 )T is the SOP of the light at the input
entrance of the polarimeter.
2.2. Necessity of calibration
Because the four photodetectors inside the polarimeter can-
not be completely consistent with each other and the gains of
the amplifying circuit cannot be exactly equal too, therefore, an
accurate calibration matrix is extremely essential to realize the
conversion from the voltage vectors to the Stokes parameters of
a polarization state.
2.3. Rapid calibration principle
A new approach of calibrating the polarimeter module based on
vector projection algorithm (Fig. 2) is utilized in our measurement
system [3].
Assume that each set of experimentally measured digital voltage
is Vi , the corresponding stokes parameters measured from polar-
ization analyzer is Si * (the true value). Based on (1), here comes
Si = MVi
Then bi = SiT SiT is the error between the calculated value S
and the true value Si . According to the vector projection theory, if
S is the best approximation of Si , then
same time. Then the calibration matrix M can be obtained through
bi , SiT =0
(2)
After a series of formula deduction, the calibration matrix M can
be derived
1
M = S V T (VV T ) (5)
In the following experiment, we only need to gather the voltages
of the polarimeter by using a 4-channel high-speed AD acquisition
card and the corresponding stokes parameters from a polariza-
tion analyzer. Then we can rapidly obtain the calibration matrix
M meeting the accuracy requirement through Eq. (5). Simulation
results show that the algorithm performs better than the traditional
iterative algorithm in both computational accuracy and stability.
3. Experimental setup
3.1. Experiment of matrix calibration
The experimental setup for calibrating the matrix of polarime-
ter is shown in Fig. 3. The optical signal of a 1550 nm laser is
passed through a tunable attenuator, so that the input optical
power can fall within the required range of the polarimeter. The
attenuator output light then passes through the polarization con-
troller (PC), the polarimeter under calibration and a polarization
analyzer. Adjusting the polarization controller (about 50 sets), so
that the polarization states are substantially uniform distributed
on the Poincar sphere. The weak output voltages of the polarime-
(3)
ter V = [V 1 , V 2 , . . ., V n ] are gathered by a 4-channel high-speed
data acquisition card (Advantech PCI-1714U). The corresponding
synchronization output SOP S = [S1 , S2 , . . ., Sn ] of the polarization
analyzer (General Photonics PSGA-101) should be recorded at the
(4) (5).

Fig. 2. Sketch of the vector projection algorithm. Fig. 4. Experimental setup for verifying the calibration matrix.

Please cite this article in press as: Y. Yu, et al., A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization detection and calibration, Optik
- Int. J. Light Electron Opt. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079
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Fig. 5. Framework of the automatic measurement system.

Fig. 6. The main block diagram of the measurement system.

3.2. Experiment of calibration verication
In order to verify the performance of the calibration matrix
obtained by the orthogonal vector projection algorithm, we use
the experiment as shown in Fig. 4. Light emitted by a continuous
laser at the wavelength of 1550 nm passes through a tunable atten-
uator into a scrambler (Agilent 11896A). Adjust the scan rate to
80 rad/s, and press the auto-scan button, then the scrambler can
continuously and randomly sweep all polarization states. Under
the effect of scrambler, the rapidly changed polarization state of
the optical signal is fed into the polarimeter. The four output volt-
ages gathered by the data acquisition card are then converted to
Stokes parameters by the calibration matrix obtained by experi-
ment.

Fig. 7. Experimental SOP on the Poincare Sphere.

Please cite this article in press as: Y. Yu, et al., A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization detection and calibration, Optik
- Int. J. Light Electron Opt. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079
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Table 1
Brief introduction of sub-vi.
Icon
Fig. 8. Experimental results of DOP and SOP.
3.3. LabVIEW application
In order to carry on the new algorithm and SOP real-time
detection, an automatic measurement system was designed and
implemented by virtual instrument. The goal was to achieve
consistent and repetitive results with a minimum of user inter-
vention and a maximum of versatility.
The system was built around a computer running an application
developed using National Instruments graphic programming lan-
guage LabVIEW. In accordance with the requirement of the system,
the application adopts modularization design which includes data
Fig. 9. Experimental results of DOP and SOP.
Please cite this article in press as: Y. Yu, et al., A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization detection and calibration, Optik
- Int. J. Light Electron Opt. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079
Function
Preprocess the voltage gathered by the AD acquisition card
Preprocess the Stokes parameters recorded from a polarization analyzer
Draw on the Poincare Sphere according to the Stokes parameters
Preprocessing the output voltage of the polarization state after the scrambler control
communication, data processing, data display and data storage.
Framework of the system is shown in Fig. 5.
Since LabVIEW is a programming environment in which blocks
representing functions, icons representing variables and lines rep-
resenting data ows pass between different functional nodes [4].
The main block diagram is shown in Fig. 6. In order to make
the main block diagram looks logically clearer, some Sub-vi are
designed. Table 1 briey illustrates the function of these sub-vis.
Fig. 7 depict the front panel and block diagram of the most impor-
tant sub-vi Poincare Sphere. Given a matrix S, its position on the
Poincar sphere is indicated by the red dots in Fig. 7(a).
With this system, it is possible for the computer to automatically
measure the calibration matrix, SOP, DOP and polarization state on
the Poincare Sphere under any circumstance.
The only task that needs to be done manually is the connection
of the cables from the system to the other instruments in the exper-
iment setup diagram. After that the test can be executed without
user intervention.
For a completely polarized light the DOP equals 1 forever,
for a partial polarized light the DOP < 1. Since the experimental
input optical signal is totally polarized, and no articial noise is
introduced in the link, the output optical signals should still remain
as completely polarized light after a fast scrambler (around rate
80 rad/s), therefore the DOP should still equals 1.
Test results as shown in Figs. 8 and 9. The gures show that the
DOP of over 8000 sampling points are very good to keep around 1,
no big glitch and uctuations and the error does not exceed 2%. The
stokes parameters S1 , S2 , S3 traverse the range of 1 to 1. Polariza-
tion state is located almost on the surface of the Poincare Sphere.
Above all, the calibration matrix obtained in this experiment has a
sufciently high accuracy.
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4. Conclusion Acknowledgments

The novelty in this paper is the design and implemen-
tation of the real-time polarization measurement system
using LabVIEW and the automation of this kind of measure-
ment system using instrument controlled though a PCI bus
interface.
The architecture of the application is divided into
four modules, separating the data acquisition, the data
processing, data displaying and data saving, which benets the
users.
The experimental results indicate that this system has
met the design requirement on computational efciency and
accuracy.
This work is supported by The Fundamental Research Funds for
the Central Universities (2009RC0401), the fund of Young Scholar
Innovation project (2012RC0407, 2012RC0406, 2011PTB-00-31).
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[2] X. Weng, X. Zhao, X. Yuan, et al., An experiment of polarization measurement
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[3] , , , , , 3 (S1)
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[4] J. Travis, J. Kring, LabVIEW for Everyone, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall, 2006.

Please cite this article in press as: Y. Yu, et al., A LabVIEW-based real-time measurement system for polarization detection and calibration, Optik
- Int. J. Light Electron Opt. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2013.10.079