Single-shot three-dimensional imaging with a metasurface depth camera

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, single-surface metasurface depth camera that passively encodes 3D scene information, enabling high-quality depth imaging with minimal hardware and low power consumption.

Contribution

It presents the first visible wavelength, polarization-insensitive metasurface depth camera that simplifies 3D imaging hardware significantly.

Findings

Achieves a fractional ranging error of 1.7%

Produces fully reconstructed 3D images from a single snapshot

Reduces system size and complexity compared to traditional depth cameras

Abstract

Depth imaging is vital for many emerging technologies with applications in augmented reality, robotics, gesture detection, and facial recognition. These applications, however, demand compact and low-power systems beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art depth cameras. Here, we leverage ultrathin dielectric metasurfaces to demonstrate a solution that, with a single surface, replicates the functionality of a high-performance depth camera typically comprising a spatial light modulator, polarizer, and three lenses. Using cylindrical nano-scatterers that can arbitrarily modify the phase of an incident wavefront, our metasurface passively encodes two complementary optical responses to depth information in a scene with a single camera snapshot. By decoding the captured data in software, our system produces a fully reconstructed image and transverse depth map of three-dimensional scenes with a fractional ranging error of 1.7%. We demonstrate the first visible wavelength and polarization-insensitive metasurface depth camera, representing a significant form factor reduction for such systems.