Two-dimensional optical edge detection based on Pancharatnam-Berry phase metasurface

Abstract

With the rapid development of metasurface and metamaterials, the image edge detection based on the optical spatial differential calculation becomes an interesting topic in recent years. There have been a certain number of studies in this region, but most of them are applicable only to one-dimensional optical spatial differential calculation. In this work, a two-dimensional optical differentiator using Pancharatnam-Berry (P-B) phase metasurface is proposed and implemented in optical image two-dimensional edge detection. Based on the principle of the spin-dependent splitting from P-B phase devices, this metasurface is capable of separating the left-handed circularly polarized light from the right-handed circularly polarized light at a certain spatial distance. After filtering out the overlapped linear polarization, the left optical information is the result of the two-dimensional optical spatial differential. Meanwhile, the resolution of the image edge information is adjustable by changing the optic axis distribution of this two-dimensional optical differentiator. These results indicate that our P-B phase metasurface can be applied to the extraction of the optical image two-dimensional edge information, and the extracted edge information is more complete than the previous one-dimensional grating metasurface. For these advantages, this two-dimensional optical differentiator shows great potential applications in ultrafast optical calculation and image processing.