Portable camera that sees polarized light. Free Technical Library News

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Portable camera that sees polarized light

11.07.2019

Scientists from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. John A. Paulson (SEAS) has developed a very compact portable camera capable of displaying the polarization of an object in a single image, according to the SEAS website. The miniature camera will find useful applications in remote sensing, in the study of atmospheric chemistry, and in machine vision. It can also be installed in self-driving cars.

Polarization is a property of light in which oscillations of the electromagnetic field of a light wave propagate in only one direction. To illustrate this property, one can imagine a rope threaded through a narrow vertical slot in a fence. If you start to vibrate the rope from one side, on the other hand it will be able to pass only vertical vibrations, and, for example, horizontal vibrations, it will not miss at all. Polarized light is invisible to the human eye (but some species of shrimp and insects can see it), but it provides a lot of information about the objects it interacts with. Polarization can help with a XNUMXD reconstruction of an object, assess its depth, texture and shape, and distinguish artificial from natural objects, even if they have the same shape and color, said Paul Chevalier, SEAS researcher and one of the authors of the study.

The polarization-sensitive cameras that are in use today have a big disadvantage: they are very bulky. In addition, they often rely on moving parts and are expensive, severely limiting their potential applications.

The new camera, on the contrary, is quite small: only about two centimeters long, and is no more complicated than the camera on a smartphone. The researchers have developed a metasurface that uses an array of subwavelength nanoparticles to guide light based on its polarization. The light then forms four images, each showing a different aspect of polarization. By combining them, we get a complete snapshot of the polarization in each pixel.

This technology could be integrated into a mobile phone or car camera in the future, allowing widespread use of polarized images and new applications.

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