Design of Computational Imaging Systems Using Wavefront-coded Dielectric Metasurfaces

Design of Computational Imaging Systems Using Wavefront-coded Dielectric Metasurfaces
Author: Shane Colburn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

High-quality cameras are widely accessible today owing to the ubiquity of smartphones and the miniaturization of sensors driven by improvements in manufacturing. These cameras, however, still rely on assemblies of aberration-correcting, refractive elements that are fundamentally the same technology in use for optical systems for centuries. While for smartphones these assemblies can be made sufficiently small, these lenses present a bulky form factor for the most stringent size and weight-constrained applications. One candidate for enabling further miniaturization is metasurfaces, which are ultrathin surfaces comprising arrays of subwavelength-spaced, spatially varying scatterers. By locally tailoring the response of each scatterer, metasurfaces can manipulate the phase, amplitude, and polarization of wavefronts at subwavelength resolution with only a wavelength-scale thickness. While promising for next-generation miniaturized optics, in an imaging context, metasurfaces exhibit significant aberrations. Most metasurface research has also focused on producing static elements, which pose a challenge for systems that require varifocal control. While there has been significant work towards circumventing these challenges through innovations in scatterer design, such approaches often entail tradeoffs in terms of system complexity, polarization dependence, efficiency, and limitations on scaling to large area apertures. In this dissertation, we instead examine the utility of computational imaging in conjunction with metasurfaces so that we can simultaneously enhance performance while maintaining the size benefits offered by metasurfaces. In a computational imaging system, software is treated as a component in the image formation process. Here, we examine this approach by exploring several different imaging modalities supported by metasurfaces combined with computation so that we can simultaneously deliver a compact form factor and high-quality images. These modalities include imaging in full color, varifocal zoom capability, and acquiring depth information from a scene. Through a combination of wavefront coding, deconvolution, and Alvarez lens-inspired conjugate metasurfaces, we demonstrate a set of separate metasurface systems that image over the full visible spectrum, can achieve more than 200% change in focal length with a 1 cm aperture, and can discriminate depths with a fractional ranging error of 1.7%. The demonstrated approach may find applications in microscopy, planar cameras, machine vision, and augmented reality.

Integrated Computational Imaging Systems

Integrated Computational Imaging Systems
Author: Joseph Van der Gracht
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2002
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

Digest and expanded papers from a November 2001 meeting offer definitions of integrated imaging, present examples of imaging systems, and describe concepts from information theory as they apply to the analysis and design of imaging systems. Material is in sections on key topics, wavefront coding, computational microscopes, information theory and design, imaging systems, implementation, hyperspectral systems, and analysis and situation. Three-dimensional coherence imaging in the Fresnel domain, spatial tomography and coherence microscopy, and modeling of sparse aperture telescope image quality are some of the areas discussed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Computational Imaging

Computational Imaging
Author: Ayush Bhandari
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262368374

A comprehensive and up-to-date textbook and reference for computational imaging, which combines vision, graphics, signal processing, and optics. Computational imaging involves the joint design of imaging hardware and computer algorithms to create novel imaging systems with unprecedented capabilities. In recent years such capabilities include cameras that operate at a trillion frames per second, microscopes that can see small viruses long thought to be optically irresolvable, and telescopes that capture images of black holes. This text offers a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this rapidly growing field, a convergence of vision, graphics, signal processing, and optics. It can be used as an instructional resource for computer imaging courses and as a reference for professionals. It covers the fundamentals of the field, current research and applications, and light transport techniques. The text first presents an imaging toolkit, including optics, image sensors, and illumination, and a computational toolkit, introducing modeling, mathematical tools, model-based inversion, data-driven inversion techniques, and hybrid inversion techniques. It then examines different modalities of light, focusing on the plenoptic function, which describes degrees of freedom of a light ray. Finally, the text outlines light transport techniques, describing imaging systems that obtain micron-scale 3D shape or optimize for noise-free imaging, optical computing, and non-line-of-sight imaging. Throughout, it discusses the use of computational imaging methods in a range of application areas, including smart phone photography, autonomous driving, and medical imaging. End-of-chapter exercises help put the material in context.

Analysis and Design Tools for Passive Ranging and Reduced-Depth-of-Field Imaging

Analysis and Design Tools for Passive Ranging and Reduced-Depth-of-Field Imaging
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 31
Release: 2003
Genre:
ISBN:

The imaging systems considered in this research involved optical image acquisition and digital signal processing. The work early during the period of this grant centered on a technique that is analogous to range detection in radar. This work used design tools in the spatial frequency domain, and the validity of the approach was confirmed in both simulations and experiments. Other work concentrated on design of the point spread function. An information theory approach was used, and the orthogonality of the images was considered. This work led to special forms of structured illumination that can be used to reduce the depth of field of an imaging system. An indirect, but important, result of the research during this period was an impact on the growth of the interest in the field of hybrid optical/digital imaging systems, or "integrated computational imaging systems" or "wavefront coding" as it is also called.

Dielectric Metamaterials

Dielectric Metamaterials
Author: Igal Brener
Publisher: Woodhead Publishing
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0081024037

Dielectric Metamaterials: Fundamentals, Designs and Applications links fundamental Mie scattering theory with the latest dielectric metamaterial research, providing a valuable reference for new and experienced researchers in the field. The book begins with a historical, evolving overview of Mie scattering theory. Next, the authors describe how to apply Mie theory to analytically solve the scattering of electromagnetic waves by subwavelength particles. Later chapters focus on Mie resonator-based metamaterials, starting with microwaves where particles are much smaller than the free space wavelengths. In addition, several chapters focus on wave-front engineering using dielectric metasurfaces and the nonlinear optical effects, spontaneous emission manipulation, active devices, and 3D effective media using dielectric metamaterials. Highlights a crucial link in fundamental Mie scattering theory with the latest dielectric metamaterial research spanning materials, design and applications Includes coverage of wave-front engineering and 3D metamaterials Provides computational codes for calculating and simulating Mie resonances

A Task-Specific Approach to Computational Imaging System Design

A Task-Specific Approach to Computational Imaging System Design
Author: Amit Ashok
Publisher:
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

The traditional approach to imaging system design places the sole burden of image formation on optical components. In contrast, a computational imaging system relies on a combination of optics and post-processing to produce the final image and/or output measurement. Therefore, the joint-optimization (JO) of the optical and the post-processing degrees of freedom plays a critical role in the design of computational imaging systems. The JO framework also allows us to incorporate task-specific performance measures to optimize an imaging system for a specific task. In this dissertation, we consider the design of computational imaging systems within a JO framework for two separate tasks: object reconstruction and iris-recognition. The goal of these design studies is to optimize the imaging system to overcome the performance degradations introduced by under-sampled image measurements. Within the JO framework, we engineer the optical point spread function (PSF) of the imager, representing the optical degrees of freedom, in conjunction with the post-processing algorithm parameters to maximize the task performance. For the object reconstruction task, the optimized imaging system achieves a 50% improvement in resolution and nearly 20% lower reconstruction root-mean-square-error (RMSE) as compared to the un-optimized imaging system. For the iris-recognition task, the optimized imaging system achieves a 33% improvement in false rejection ratio (FRR) for a fixed alarm ratio (FAR) relative to the conventional imaging system. The effect of the performance measures like resolution, RMSE, FRR, and FAR on the optimal design highlights the crucial role of task-specific design metrics in the JO framework. We introduce a fundamental measure of task-specific performance known as task-specific information (TSI), an information-theoretic measure that quantifies the information content of an image measurement relevant to a specific task. A variety of source-models are derived to illustrate the application of a TSI-based analysis to conventional and compressive imaging (CI) systems for various tasks such as target detection and classification. A TSI-based design and optimization framework is also developed and applied to the design of CI systems for the task of target detection, it yields a six-fold performance improvement over the conventional imaging system at low signal-to-noise ratios.

Scalable Computational Optical Imaging System Designs

Scalable Computational Optical Imaging System Designs
Author: Ronan Kerviche
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

Computational imaging and sensing leverages the joint-design of optics, detectors and processing to overcome the performance bottlenecks inherent to the traditional imaging paradigm. This novel imaging and sensing design paradigm essentially allows new trade-offs between the optics, detector and processing components of an imaging system and enables broader operational regimes beyond the reach of conventional imaging architectures, which are constrained by well-known Rayleigh, Strehl and Nyquist rules amongst others. In this dissertation, we focus on scalability aspects of these novel computational imaging architectures, their design and implementation, which have far-reaching impacts on the potential and feasibility of realizing task-specific performance gains relative to traditional imager designs. For the extended depth of field (EDoF) computational imager design, which employs a customized phase mask to achieve defocus immunity, we propose a joint-optimization framework to simultaneously optimize the parameters of the optical phase mask and the processing algorithm, with the system design goal of minimizing the noise and artifacts in the final processed image. Using an experimental prototype, we demonstrate that our optimized system design achieves higher fidelity output compared to other static designs from the literature, such as the Cubic and Trefoil phase masks. While traditional imagers rely on an isomorphic mapping between the scene and the optical measurements to form images, they do not exploit the inherent compressibility of natural images and thus are subject to Nyquist sampling. Compressive sensing exploits the inherent redundancy of natural images, basis of image compression algorithms like JPEG/JPEG2000, to make linear projection measurements with far fewer samples than Nyquist for the image forming task. Here, we present a block wise compressive imaging architecture which is scalable to high space-bandwidth products (i.e. large FOV and high resolution applications) and employs a parallelizable and non-iterative piecewise linear reconstruction algorithm capable of operating in real-time. Our compressive imager based on this scalable architecture design is not limited to the imaging task and can also be used for automatic target recognition (ATR) without an intermediate image reconstruction. To maximize the detection and classification performance of this compressive ATR sensor, we have developed a scalable statistical model of natural scenes, which enables the optimization of the compressive sensor projections with the Cauchy-Schwarz mutual information metric. We demonstrate the superior performance of this compressive ATR system using simulation and experiment. Finally, we investigate the fundamental resolution limit of imaging via the canonical incoherent quasi-monochromatic two point-sources separation problem. We extend recent results in the literature demonstrating, with Fisher information and estimator mean square error analysis, that a passive optical mode-sorting architecture with only two measurements can outperform traditional intensity-based imagers employing an ideal focal plane array in the sub-Rayleigh range, thus overcoming the Rayleigh resolution limit.

Metasurface Holography

Metasurface Holography
Author: Zi-Lan Deng
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3031023862

The merging of metasurface and holography brings about unprecedented opportunities for versatile manipulation of light in terms of both far-field wavefront and near-field profile. In this book, a brief evolving history from surface plasmon polariton holography to metamaterial holography and finally to metasurface holography is introduced at first. Basic physical mechanisms that govern the phase modulation rules behind metasurface holography design are discussed later. Next, extended functionalities such as arbitrary polarization holography, vectorial holography, full-color holography, and hybrid holography achieved in the metasurface platform are presented. Surface wave and metagrating holography that bridges the on-chip surface wave and free-space wave is also introduced. In the end, we envisage practical applications of high-fidelity 3D holographic display, high-secure encryption, and high capacity digital encoding and also indicate remaining challenges based on metasurface holography.

Coded Aperture Design in Compressive Spectral Imaging

Coded Aperture Design in Compressive Spectral Imaging
Author: Laura Galvis-Carreno
Publisher:
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN: 9780438423596

Compressive Spectral Imaging (CSI) systems sense 3D spatio-spectral data cubes through just few two dimensional (2D) projections by using a coded aperture, a dispersive element, and an FPA. The coded apertures in these systems, whose main function is the modulation of the data cube, are often implemented through photomasks attached to piezoelectric devices. The optimization of such coded aperture patterns is an actual area of research. Two remarkable improvements on this configuration have been recently proposed. First, the replacement of the photomask by digital micromirror devices (DMD) for block-unblock coding in order to facilitate the capture of multiple projections/snapshots or the capture of multiple shots at video rates without the displacement of the optical elements on the system. Secondly, the replacement of block-unblock coded apertures by patterned optical filter arrays, referred as “colored” coded apertures, which not only allow spatial modulation but spectral modulation as well. Despite the improvements, the design of the coded aperture patterns is still constrained by hardware considerations. This dissertation aims to overcome these hardware considerations by developing different coded aperture design strategies. ☐ When using the DMD for coding the data cube, the DMD resolution and the possibility to use multiple shots have to be considered. Usually, the pitch size of the DMD mirrors is different than the pitch size of the pixels in the detector. The mismatch of the DMD mirrors and the detector pixels is such that pixel-to-pixel correspondence is not achieved. The first proposed strategy is a mismatching coded aperture design to exploit the maximum resolution of the coding element and the detector. Additionally, the capture of multiple snapshots could be highly exploited to extract prior-information of the scenes, here a second strategy is proposed, the use of side information in CSI not only to improve the reconstructions but to design scenes-adaptive coded aperture patterns. ☐ On the other hand, when using “colored” coded apertures, its real implementation in terms of cost and complexity, directly depends on the number of filters to be used as well as the number of shots. A shifting color coded aperture optimization featuring these observations is proposed as the third strategy with the aim to improve the quality reconstruction and to generate an achievable optical implementation. ☐ The mathematical models of the different strategies of computational imaging to overcome the limitations of actual CSI systems will be presented along with testbed implementations. Simulations as well as experimental results will prove the accuracy and performance of the three proposed coding strategies.