Classification of microplastic particles in water using polarized light scattering and machine learning methods

The detection and classification of microplastics in water remain a significant challenge due to their diverse properties and the limitations of traditional optical methods. Standard spectroscopic techniques often suffer from the strong infrared absorption of water, while many emerging optical approaches rely on transmission geometries that require sample transparency. This study presents a systematic classification framework utilizing polarimetric backscattering at 120° from the incident beam and deep learning to identify common polymers (HDPE, LDPE, and PP) directly in water. This backscattering-based approach is specifically designed to analyze opaque, irregularly shaped particles that lack distinguishable surface features under standard illumination. To ensure high-fidelity data, we introduce a feedback review loop to identify and remove outliers, which significantly stabilizes model training and improves generalization. This framework is validated on a dataset of 600 individually imaged microplastic fragments spanning three polymer types. Our results evaluate the distinct contributions of the Angle of Linear Polarization and the Degree of Linear Polarization to the classification process. By implementing a late fusion architecture to combine these signals, we achieve an average test accuracy of 83%. Finally, a systematic feature hierarchy analysis reveals that the convolutional neural network relies on internal polarization textures associated with the particles’ microstructure, rather than on macro-contours, with classification accuracy declining by over 40% when internal structure is removed. This demonstrates that the system extracts polarization-dependent internal structural information that is inaccessible to conventional intensity-only imaging methods.