The automatic measurement is described for the relative retardation and principal axes in a photoelastic model. Also explained are the optical arrangement and method for the stress analysis of circular-polarized incident light. The data processing part of the system is composed of a CCD camera, a digital image-frame memory, and a personal computer. Therefore, the images produced by the combination of a quarter-wave plate and a polarizer are converted into digital images and are processed for each pixel. The results of an epoxy resin disk subjected to diametral compression show the usefulness of this method.