Robustness of Planar Fourier Capture Arrays to Colour Changes and Lost Pixels

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the robustness of Planar Fourier Capture Arrays (PFCAs) under non-ideal conditions, demonstrating their ability to operate with different wavelengths, recover scenes with missing pixels, and infer unknown wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces methods to maintain PFCA performance despite wavelength variations, pixel failures, and unknown light conditions, enhancing their practical applicability.

Findings

PFCAs can operate with wavelengths different from the design point.

Scene reconstruction is possible with only 10% functional ASPs using compressed sensing.

Wavelengths can be inferred from sensor outputs through self-consistency checks.

Abstract

Planar Fourier capture arrays (PFCAs) are optical sensors built entirely in standard microchip manufacturing flows. PFCAs are composed of ensembles of angle sensitive pixels (ASPs) that each report a single coefficient of the Fourier transform of the far-away scene. Here we characterize the performance of PFCAs under the following three non-optimal conditions. First, we show that PFCAs can operate while sensing light of a wavelength other than the design point. Second, if only a randomly-selected subset of 10% of the ASPs are functional, we can nonetheless reconstruct the entire far-away scene using compressed sensing. Third, if the wavelength of the imaged light is unknown, it can be inferred by demanding self-consistency of the outputs.