An innovative optical system and method is disclosed for analyzing and uniquely identifying high-order refractive indices samples in a diverse population of nearly identical samples. The system and method are particularly suitable for ultra-fine materials having similar color, shape and features which are difficult to identify through conventional chemical, physical, electrical or optical methods due to a lack of distinguishing features. The invention discloses a uniquely configured optical system which employs polarized sample light passing through a full wave compensation plate, a linear polarizer analyzer and a quarter wave retardation plate for producing vivid color bi-refringence pattern images which uniquely identify high-order refractive indices samples in a diverse population of nearly visually identical samples. The resultant patterns display very subtle differences between species which are frequently indiscernable by conventional microscopy methods. When these images are analyzed with a trainable with a statistical learning model, such as a soft-margin support vector machine with a Gaussian RBF kernel, good discrimination is obtained on a feature set extracted from Gabor wavelet transforms and color distribution angles of each image. By constraining the Gabor center frequencies to be low, the resulting system can attain classification accuracy in excess of 90% for vertically oriented images, and in excess of 80% for randomly oriented images.