A Meta‐Device for Intelligent Depth Perception

Abstract The optical illusion affects depth‐sensing due to the limited and specific light‐field information acquired by single‐lens imaging. The incomplete depth information or visual deception would cause cognitive errors. To resolve this problem, an intelligent and compact depth‐sensing meta‐device that is miniaturized, integrated, and applicable for diverse scenes in all light levels is demonstrated. The compact and multifunction stereo vision system adopts an array with 3600 achromatic meta‐lenses and a size of 1.2 × 1.2 mm² to measure the depth over a 30 cm range with deep‐learning support. The meta‐lens array can act as multiple imaging lenses to collect light field information. It can also work with a light source as an active optical device to project a structured light. The meta‐lens array can serve as the core functional component of a light‐field imaging system under bright conditions or a structured‐light projection system in the dark. The depth information in both ways can be analyzed and extracted by the convolutional neural network. This work provides a new avenue for the applications such as autonomous driving, machine vision, human–computer interaction, augmented reality, biometric identification, etc.