Researchers Develop Single-Layer Metasurface for Snapshot Full-Stokes Polarization Imaging
Scientists have designed an end-to-end optical-digital system using a single-layered metasurface and a neural network backend to capture full-Stokes polarization images across red, green, and blue wavelengths in a single snapshot. The system jointly optimizes a differentiable metasurface—modeled by a multilayer perceptron—with a U-Net image reconstruction network, eliminating the need for bulky optics or multiple sequential measurements. The approach achieves competitive image quality metrics and could enable compact, high-performance polarization cameras for applications in remote sensing, biomedical imaging, and materials inspection.
A research team has presented an end-to-end inverse-designed imaging system that reconstructs full-Stokes polarization information across RGB wavelengths from a single sensor snapshot. The core innovation is a single-layered metasurface frontend that encodes polarization state information, jointly optimized alongside a U-Net deep learning backend responsible for image reconstruction. The metasurface itself is modeled using a multilayer perceptron (MLP), enabling differentiable, gradient-based co-design of the optical and computational components. On a real-world dataset, the system achieves 27.06 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 0.7172 structural similarity index (SSIM) for monochromatic imaging at 0.44 micrometers, and 23.35 dB / 0.5643 SSIM for full RGB-achromatic polarization imaging. The authors argue that this optical-digital co-design paradigm delivers high compression ratios and a compact physical footprint compared to conventional polarimetric architectures that rely on multiplexed measurements and bulky optical elements. The work is currently a preprint posted to arXiv and has not yet undergone formal peer review.
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As a preprint, this work has not yet been peer-reviewed, and independent experimental validation by other groups is absent.
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- arXiv physicsCenter
End-to-End Inverse Designed Single-Layered Metasurface for Snapshot RGB-Achromatic Full-Stokes Polarization Imaging
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