2019/10/26 by Shane Colburn, Arka Majumdar, Colburn, Shane +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Optical Imaging Technologies #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Optics (physics.optics) #Random lasers and scattering media #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.12111
openalex publication_date 2019/10/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Depth imaging is vital for many emerging technologies with applications in augmented reality, robotics, gesture detection, and facial recognition. These applications, however, demand compact and low-power systems beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art depth cameras. Here, we leverage ultrathin dielectric metasurfaces to demonstrate a solution that, with a single surface, replicates the functionality of a high-performance depth camera typically comprising a spatial light modulator, polarizer, and three lenses. Using cylindrical nano-scatterers that can arbitrarily modify the phase of an incident wavefront, our metasurface passively encodes two complementary optical responses to depth information in a scene with a single camera snapshot. By decoding the captured data in software, our system produces a fully reconstructed image and transverse depth map of three-dimensional scenes with a fractional ranging error of 1.7%. We demonstrate the first visible wavelength and polarization-insensitive metasurface depth camera, representing a significant form factor reduction for such systems.