Polarization State Tracing for Reflection Removal and Color-Consistent Reconstruction

Colored glass is widely used in everyday settings, yet its reflective and absorptive properties often introduce ghost shadows and color bias in captured images. However, existing methods typically neglect the absorption issue, making it difficult to address color bias caused by colored glass. To address this, we are the first to apply polarization imaging theory to model the light transmission process within glass. Specifically, we propose a novel imaging model, the Polarization State Tracing Model (PSTM), which traces polarized light along multiple propagation paths and accounts for wavelength-selective absorption, enabling joint reflection removal and color-consistent reconstruction. Guided by PSTM, we design a Channel Ring Attention (CRA) mechanism to efficiently capture inter-angle polarization dependencies and enhance feature interaction across polarization channels, ensuring physically consistent recovery. Besides, the recovered polarization information can be directly applied to advanced downstream tasks, such as Shape-from-Polarization (SfP). We construct a real-world dataset, GlassPol, containing a wide range of glass materials, enabling testing under diverse optical conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 3dB improvement in PSNR, establishing a new benchmark for polarized reflection removal.