Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Photonics Center, Boston University, 8 Saint Mary's Street, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Apr 2;11(1):1637. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15460-0.
The vision system of arthropods such as insects and crustaceans is based on the compound-eye architecture, consisting of a dense array of individual imaging elements (ommatidia) pointing along different directions. This arrangement is particularly attractive for imaging applications requiring extreme size miniaturization, wide-angle fields of view, and high sensitivity to motion. However, the implementation of cameras directly mimicking the eyes of common arthropods is complicated by their curved geometry. Here, we describe a lensless planar architecture, where each pixel of a standard image-sensor array is coated with an ensemble of metallic plasmonic nanostructures that only transmits light incident along a small geometrically-tunable distribution of angles. A set of near-infrared devices providing directional photodetection peaked at different angles is designed, fabricated, and tested. Computational imaging techniques are then employed to demonstrate the ability of these devices to reconstruct high-quality images of relatively complex objects.
节肢动物（如昆虫和甲壳类动物）的视觉系统基于复眼结构，由沿着不同方向指向的密集排列的单个成像元件（小眼）组成。这种排列对于需要极端尺寸小型化、广角视场和对运动高度敏感的成像应用特别有吸引力。然而，直接模仿常见节肢动物眼睛的相机的实现受到其弯曲几何形状的限制。在这里，我们描述了一种无透镜的平面架构，其中标准图像传感器阵列的每个像素都涂有一组金属等离子体纳米结构，这些纳米结构仅传输沿小几何可调角度分布的光。设计、制造和测试了一组提供在不同角度处具有峰值的定向光电探测器的近红外设备。然后使用计算成像技术来证明这些设备能够重建相对复杂物体的高质量图像的能力。
