A system for determining polarization profiles of points in a scene from video frames using Stokes parameters includes a scene having a region that emits scene light rays that correspond to the points in the scene, an optical chopper controller, a rotating Stokes filter wheel that includes five trigger holes, three rotating linear polarizers, a circular polarizer, and a reference screen, a color filter, a video camera having a video frame, and a computer system having a frame grabber apparatus. The scene light rays are transmitted through the Stokes filter and the color filter to the video camera. Images corresponding to the scene light rays are projected onto respective pixels in the video frame and recorded as two-dimensional (2-D) arrays, and the images corresponding to the scene light rays from four unique images, obtained from light transmitted consecutively through three linear polarizers and a circular polarizer of the rotating Stokes filter wheel, are used by programming in the computer system to calculate respective Stokes parameters of the points in the scene.