Biologically Inspired, Optical Waveguide with Isolation Layer Integrated Microlens Array for High‐Contrast Imaging

Abstract

AbstractThe compound eyes of insects in nature provide many innovative perspectives for the development of bionic imaging devices. The construction of thousands of ommatidia favors compound eye imaging, and the close arrangement between each small eye generates a significant amount of optical crosstalk. This work reports an optical waveguide integrated with isolation‐layer microlens array (WIMLA) with high‐contrast, high‐resolution imaging inspired by the compound eyes of insects. This WIMLA is mainly fabricated by self‐written optical waveguide formed under ultraviolet exposure and the introduction of a black photoresist under the action of capillary force to achieve the effect of double isolation. The experimental results demonstrate that image contrast increases by 59.8% with double‐layer isolation and the full width at half‐maximum reduces by 27.7% in comparison with those of the MLA without any isolation layer. As a result, a more focused optical path can be confined inside the microlens for transmission. Panoramic stitching is accomplished by traversing all potential matching subimages with the edge detection and breadth‐first search algorithms. The combination of the prepared WIMLA with commercial cameras to capture faces will open up new possibilities for mobile navigation, face recognition, and medical monitoring.