The Next Dimension of Vision: Polarization Imaging for the Hard Tech Era

Session details:

As the capabilities of machine vision continue to accelerate, the bottleneck is no longer computation—it’s the quality of the input itself. Optics and image sensing sit at the critical interface between real-world visual information and the algorithms that interpret it. To fully empower machine vision, cameras and depth sensors must capture not just intensity and dot maps, but entirely new dimensions of light.

Polarization imaging offers one of the most powerful new dimensions of insight—revealing stress patterns, surface textures, and features invisible to current mass market systems. Using foundry compatible processes, optical metasurfaces can be engineered to capture polarization information with a single infrared image and camera. Metalenz has created a full stack solution around this technology innovation, designing computational algorithms in parallel with optical hardware to parse this new set of light information. This new approach to image sensing, centered around the unique capabilities of metasurface optics, delivers unprecedented insights to mass market machine vision and consumer devices for the first time, while reducing system size, cost, and complexity compared to current solutions.  

This keynote looks ahead at how polarization-enabled depth sensing and shape recognition will transform security, robotics, AR/VR, and beyond. By making lab-quality polarization sensing manufacturable at semiconductor scale, metasurfaces are enabling the perceptive, accurate and efficient vision systems that the next decade of innovation requires.