Changchun Institute Of Optical Mechanics Makes Breakthrough in High-dimensional Light Field Detection

Changchun Institute of Optical Precision Machinery and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was informed that the Institute's research team for the first time in the international community to use a single device through a single measurement of the broadband spectral range of high-dimensional light field with arbitrary changes in the polarization and intensity of the comprehensive characterization, thus realizing the breakthrough progress of high-dimensional light field information detection.
With the rapid development of information technology, there is an increasing demand for light field perception. The light field contains multiple dimensions of information such as intensity, polarization, frequency, and phase. Among them, spectral detection and polarization detection contain information about the material composition and surface topography of an object, which are of great application value in the fields of optical communication, remote sensing, and industrial inspection.
Current polarization and spectral detectors usually only measure intensity and polarization at a fixed wavelength or intensity and wavelength information at a uniform polarization. However, in many scenarios in nature, light fields may carry arbitrary polarization and intensity variations over a wide spectral range, and it is difficult for existing detectors to achieve detection of such high-dimensional information.
The researchers proposed the innovative idea of "utilizing the spatial and frequency dispersion properties of optical interfaces to modulate the polarization and spectral response in the wavevector space," which maps all the information of high-dimensional light fields into a single imaging result. Together with the deep learning method to decode the polarization and spectral information, the detection of high-dimensional optical information is finally realized, and the detection accuracy is comparable to that of existing advanced single-function small polarizers or spectrometers.
In addition, by simply combining a thin film with a microlens array and an imaging sensor array in a "sandwich" style, they have made an ultra-integrated high-dimensional light-field imager that requires no alignment and a single measurement. This breakthrough results for ultra-compact, high-dimensional information detection and imaging detection opens up a new way.
It is understood that this method has the potential for ultra-broadband detection, and the proposed method can be further integrated with image processing, ranging, and other functions to achieve higher dimensional light field detection. At the same time, its use of photonic crystals, super-surfaces, and two-dimensional materials instead of thin-film structures can further improve the detection resolution and integration capabilities.
In addition, it is also a future research direction for the research team to further organically combine the physical model therein with deep learning to enhance the solving capability and reduce the amount of a priori data required.
The related results were published in Nature, with PhD students Yandong Fan, Weian Huang and Fei Zhu from Changchun Institute of Optical Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CIO) as the co-first authors of the paper, and researcher Wei Li, assistant researcher Chunqi Jin from Changchun Institute of Optical Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CIO), and Prof. Cheng-Wei Qiu from National University of Singapore (NUS) as the co-corresponding authors.