Plasmonic ommatidia for lensless compound-eye vision
Leonard C. Kogos, Yunzhe Li, Jianing Liu, Yuyu Li, Lei Tian, Roberto Paiella
Abstract
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.