There have been numerous attempts to correlate light scattering measurements with the characteristics of surface roughness. Another but considerably more difficult approach is to solve the inverse scattering problem. A number of different empirical models of surface roughness have been used to characterize surfaces including the sine grating, triangle grating (echelette), and rectangle grating. In this paper, we use, for the first time, the random phase mask model, which is a two-dimension orthogonal grating with a stochastic distribution of square "defects" with size a. We describe our calculations of the polarizing characteristics of the random phase mask and discuss the influence of each of the parameters of defects on polarizing angles. The analysis was carried out for multiple-angles-of-incidence ellipsometric measurements. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.