Experimental demonstration of edge detection by dielectric metasurfaces

Abstract

Metasurfaces offer unique opportunities for optical signal processing [1] and the design of neuromorphic optical networks [2] for image-processing. Among different image-processing operations, edge detection is one of the essential algorithms with practical applications in microscopy or autonomous systems. The edge detection removes the plain parts of an image, to keep only the edges where the intensity changes abruptly. As such, the processed image contains just silhouettes of the object, Fig. 1a. In microscopy, edge detection helps to identify the structure of cells, while in autonomous systems, such as cars or drones, the optical edge detection can reduce the volume of data to compute on board of the vehicle, making it work faster and safer. Show more