Shijie
Xiong
and
Xianguang
Yang
*
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanophotonic Manipulation, Institute of Nanophotonics, College of Physics & Optoelectronic Engineering, Jinan University, Guangzhou 511443, China. E-mail: xianguang@jnu.edu.cn
First published on 21st March 2024
Nano-color routing has emerged as an immensely popular and widely discussed subject in the realms of light field manipulation, image sensing, and the integration of deep learning. The conventional dye filters employed in commercial applications have long been hampered by several limitations, including subpar signal-to-noise ratio, restricted upper bounds on optical efficiency, and challenges associated with miniaturization. Nonetheless, the advent of bandpass-free color routing has opened up unprecedented avenues for achieving remarkable optical spectral efficiency and operation at sub-wavelength scales within the area of image sensing applications. This has brought about a paradigm shift, fundamentally transforming the field by offering a promising solution to surmount the constraints encountered with traditional dye filters. This review presents a comprehensive exploration of representative deep learning-driven nano-color routing structure designs, encompassing forward simulation algorithms, photonic neural networks, and various global and local topology optimization methods. A thorough comparison is drawn between the exceptional light-splitting capabilities exhibited by these methods and those of traditional design approaches. Additionally, the existing research on color routing is summarized, highlighting a promising direction for forthcoming development, delivering valuable insights to advance the field of color routing and serving as a powerful reference for future endeavors.
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| Fig. 1 Different image sensor filtering strategies and color routing mechanisms. (a) V-shaped all-dielectric antenna wavelength router. Reproduced with permission.29 Copyright © 2016 American Chemical Society. (b) Sub-micrometer nanostructure-based RGB filters for CMOS image sensors. Reproduced with permission.30 Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society. (c) R-G1-B-G2 full-color routing with multiplex GaN metalens.31 (d) Schematic of a conventional CMOS image sensor and metalens-based color router. Reproduced with permission.31 Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society. | ||
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| Fig. 2 Color routing mechanisms in different implementation forms. (a) A new type of splitter composed of irregular structures.42 (b) Top view of the color-coded layers for an irregular-layer topology-optimized splitter structure. Reproduced with permission.42 Copyright © 2021 Elsevier. (c) Spectrum splitter consisting of TiO2 bars and SiO2 substrates. Reproduced with permission.43 Copyright © 2019 IEEE. (d) Multilayer-designed spectral router fabricated by lithography and material deposition. Reproduced with permission.44 Copyright © 2020 The Optical Society. (e) Schematic of an image sensor with a full-color-sorting metalens array. Reproduced with permission.45 Copyright © 2021 Optica Publishing Group. (f) Pixel-level Bayer-type color router based on metasurfaces. Reproduced with permission.46 Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature. | ||
000 examples using a learning rate of 0.0006 and a decay of 0.99. This network predicts the thickness of nano-shell structures with high precision, achieving comparable accuracy of over ∼90% to traditional simulations with minimal training data. While currently applied to nano-shell structure prediction, the demonstrated potential of this method extends to various inverse design problems. Similarly, this avant-garde inverse prediction method is highly popular in the metasurface domain. The metasurface design often involves elemental atoms, requiring repeated trial and error to achieve the desired electromagnetic response. The conventional design process, entailing numerous physical and geometric parameters, demands significant computational resources.56,57 As highlighted in Fig. 3c, the meta-atom data were randomly split into training and test data sets, with 70% data used during the training process and the remaining 30% data used to evaluate the trained network. The average mean squared error (MSE) for the real and imaginary parts of the predicted coefficients in the test data were 0.00035 and 0.00023, respectively, which dramatically reduces representation time while ensuring accuracy. In Fig. 3d and e, another model, deep neural network (DNN), predicts the geometric shape of nanostructures by collecting the far-field response spectrum. This method can be extended to predict other physical or optical parameters of host materials and compounds, addressing inverse problems that conventional methods struggle to resolve. In the field of chemistry, a DL model has been proposed to predict the optical and physical properties of organic compounds. This model, trained on a dataset of 30
094 luminescent groups, successfully achieves effective prediction and screening, as illustrated in Fig. 3f. Another core application of deep learning is dedicated to the realm of optical storage and computation. For this purpose, a geometric information encoding scheme for subwavelength dielectric nanostructures has been introduced. Building neural networks based on over 40
000 scattering spectra of these structures, it ultimately achieves a readout accuracy of >99%, with sequences of up to 9 bits as shown in Fig. 3g. This paves the way for high-density optical information storage in planar silicon nanostructures.
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| Fig. 3 Relevant achievements and progress of various deep learning technologies in the field of optics. (a) Diffractive optical network-based multispectral imaging system. Reproduced with permission.58 Copyright © 2023 Springer Nature. (b) A method using artificial neural networks to approximate light scattering by multilayer nanoparticles. Reproduced with permission.59 Copyright © 2018 AAAS. (c) CNN-based model aiming at modeling meta-atoms with high degrees of freedom. Reproduced with permission.60 Copyright © 2020 The Optical Society. (d and e) Deep neural network-enabled plasmonic nanostructure design. Reproduced with permission.61 Copyright © 2018 Springer Nature. (f) Deep learning optical spectroscopy applied in molecular design. Reproduced with permission.62 Copyright © 2021 American Chemical Society. (g) The deep learning method used in increasing optical information storage. Reproduced with permission.63 Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature. | ||
000 images with (20 × 20)-pixel resolution) were eventually down-sampled into 8 × 8 pixels reaching a classification accuracy of 97.5%. Addressing spectral optimization challenges at the algorithmic level, deep learning function interpretation proves more capable of reflecting implicit connections between structural parameters and optical responses. In Fig. 4f, a proposed convolutional correlator neural network (CCNN) serves as a non-linear architecture generating features that can interpret class image data effectively, demonstrating excellent model generalization capabilities for recognizing images with random structures in the red, green, and blue color routing channels.
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| Fig. 4 Optical splitting routing design under different optimization strategy designs. (a) Bayer-array color routing optimized using the genetic algorithm. Reproduced with permission.40 Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature. (b) A single-layer QR-code-like nano-color router enhanced using the NSGA-II algorithm.72 (c) Ultracompact color splitter driven by an inverse design genetic algorithm. Reproduced with permission.73 Copyright © 2022 American Chemical Society. (d) RGB-IR router optimized by gradient-based optimization combined with an FDTD solution. Reproduced with permission.74 Copyright © 2021 John Wiley and Sons. (e) The deep neural network for far-field recognition of subwavelength image sensor optimization. Reproduced with permission.75 Copyright © 2020 American Physical Society. (f) The correlator convolutional neural network architecture used in image reconstruction optimization. Reproduced with permission.76 Copyright © 2021 Springer Nature. | ||
000 metasurface unit cell designs) is proposed for optimizing the designs of plasmonic and dielectric metasurfaces (as shown in Fig. 5c). The mentioned DCGAN model exhibits good generalization capabilities in both image and spectral generation (maintained accuracy ∼90%). By training the generator to establish the mapping relationship between input data and random latent vectors (200-dimensional column vector), and iteratively refining the results through error backpropagation with the discriminator, the model achieves structures that closely approach the optimization objectives. This work undoubtedly represents a notable application of deep learning in the inverse design of nanophotonic structures, offering constructive insights into the inverse design of nanophotonic color routing.
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| Fig. 5 Application of inverse design methods in the field of photonics. (a) Deep neural network inverse design of the integrated photonic power splitter. Reproduced with permission.88 Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature. (b) Inverse design of the Fabry-Perot cavity-based color filter using the bidirectional artificial neural network. Reproduced with permission.89 Copyright © 2021 Optica Publishing Group. (c) Global inverse design across multiple photonic structure classes using generative deep learning. Reproduced with permission.90 Copyright © 2021 John Wiley and Sons. | ||
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