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Depolarization and linear-retardance are the increasingly interesting polarization characteristics for disease diagnosis in clinic and scientific study. They can not only be obtained by Mueller polarimetry normally, but also the Stokes polarimetric imaging. Stokes polarimetric imaging with circularly polarized illumination can provide the main optical properties of tissues with a simpler device in a shorter time, which is much more attractive. Unfortunately, it is difficult to realize the standard circularly polarized illumination actually in experiments. In this paper, we establish a theoretical model to display the relationship between the nonstandard circularly polarized illumination and the accuracy of the measurement results. Compared to the measurement results by Mueller polarimetry, we found that the depolarizations measured are the same but retardances measured are not. And except the influence of the nonstandard circularly polarized illumination, the sample’s optical characteristics also affect the accuracy of the measured retardance. Additionally, we have conducted a comparative experiment between Mueller polarimetry and the Stokes polarimetric imaging to verify. According to the simulation and experiment, we have confirmed that Stokes polarimetric imaging has good performance in measuring most samples and broadband detection, but there is a large error for measuring strongly birefringent samples. Our work quantitatively analyzes the effect of nonstandard circularly polarized illumination on the accuracy of Stokes polarimetric imaging through theoretical derivation for the first time. It enriches the error theory of Stokes polarimetric imaging with circularly polarized illumination and lays a foundation for the improvement and application.
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