Lens-free compound eye cameras based on angle-sensitive meta-surfaces

Abstract

A lens-free ultrathin imaging sensor using a compound-eye vision modality can be formed by forming a metasurface on each pixel of an array of pixels in a solid state imaging sensor. The metasurface can be configured to form a diffraction grating that directs light incident on the metasurface at a predefined angle to excite surface plasmon polaritons into the solid state imaging sensor and light incident at any other angle is reflected or diffracted away from the metasurface. Each pixel of the imaging sensor can be configured using the metasurface to only receive light incident from a different portion of a field of view. A computational imaging system can be used to construct the image from the individual pixels.