Wideband optical edge detection based on dielectric metasurface

Optical image edge detection manifests itself as the advantages of fast speed, low energy consumption, parallel operation, and large information capacity, playing a crucial role in object and image recognition in the realms of biology, medicine, and artificial intelligence. In this paper, a dielectric metasurface that can achieve object edge detection in the full visible band is proposed. By combining two optical differential methods referring to spatial spectrum-dependent transmission function and 4f system-based spatial spectrum phase shift, a tetratomic macropixel metasurface that enables polarization-correlated interference based on dual geometric phase modulation is designed, which can achieve object edge detection under 473, 530, and 633 nm wavelengths, and even under white light conditions. This coherent filtering metasurface operator provides a flexible approach for achieving wideband two-dimensional edge detection.