Bioinspired Focal-Plane Polarization Image Sensor Design: From Application to Implementation

Abstract

In this paper, a bioinspired monolithic complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) polarization image sensor is described as a solution to real-time polarization image capture. Metallic wire-grid gratings are integrated onto standard CMOS image sensor arrays with different orientations. A numerical analysis is performed to guide the design of the wire-grid arrays. Experimental results from different CMOS processing units are compared. A current-mode polarization processing unit is designed, fabricated, and tested in order to perform the extraction of the polarization characteristics from the captured intensities. This paper illustrates how polarization image processing can be used to monitor live cells. Several polarization processing methods with different computational complexity and data requirements have been applied and compared.