Abstract
Optical imaging is commonly used for both scientific and technological applications across industry and academia. In image sensing, a measurement, such as of an object’s position or contour, is performed by computational analysis of a digitized image. An emerging image-sensing paradigm relies on optical systems that—instead of performing imaging—act as encoders that optically compress images into low-dimensional spaces by extracting salient features; however, the performance of these encoders is typically limited by their linearity. Here we report a nonlinear, multilayer optical neural network (ONN) encoder for image sensing based on a commercial image intensifier as an optical-to-optical nonlinear activation function. This nonlinear ONN outperforms similarly sized linear optical encoders across several representative tasks, including machine-vision benchmarks, flow-cytometry image classification and identification of objects in a three-dimensionally printed real scene. For machine-vision tasks, especially those featuring incoherent broadband illumination, our concept allows for a considerable reduction in the requirement of camera resolution and electronic post-processing complexity. In general, image pre-processing with ONNs should enable image-sensing applications that operate accurately with fewer pixels, fewer photons, higher throughput and lower latency.
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Data availability
The demonstration data for data gathering, as well as training data for the all-optical/digital neural networks, are available at https://github.com/mcmahon-lab/Image-sensing-with-multilayer-nonlinear-optical-neural-networks.
Code availability
All of the data generated, and code used, in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6888985.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank NTT Research for their financial and technical support (to T.W., L.G.W., S.-Y.M., T.O. and P.L.M.). Portions of this work were supported by the National Science Foundation (award no. CCF-1918549 to T.W., M.M. Stein and P.L.M.), a Kavli Institute at Cornell instrumentation grant (to T.W. and P.L.M.), and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship (to P.L.M.). P.L.M. acknowledges membership of the CIFAR Quantum Information Science Program as an Azrieli Global Scholar. T.W. acknowledges the partial support from Schmidt Futures via an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship to Cornell University. We acknowledge helpful discussions with A. Senanian, B. Malia, F. Presutti, V. Kremenetski, S. Prabhu, A. Barth, R. Oliver, and D. Schraivogel. We also acknowledge S. Sohoni for help with figure design.
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T.W., L.G.W., M.M. Sohoni and P.L.M. conceived the project and designed the experiments. M.M. Sohoni and T.W. built and performed the experiments on the nonlinear and linear ONN encoders, and analysed the data. T.W. performed the extended cell-organelle simulations. M.M. Stein performed the neural architecture search for QuickDraw reconstruction. S-Y.M. and T.O. aided in simulations of deep optical encoders. M.G.A. assisted with 3D-scene modelling. L.G.W., T.W., M.M. Sohoni and P.L.M. wrote the manuscript. P.L.M. and L.G.W. supervised the project.
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T.W., M.M. Sohoni, L.G.W. and P.L.M. are listed as inventors on a US provisional patent application (serial no. 63/392,042) on nonlinear optical neural network pre-processors for imaging and image sensing. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Wang, T., Sohoni, M.M., Wright, L.G. et al. Image sensing with multilayer nonlinear optical neural networks. Nat. Photon. 17, 408–415 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01170-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01170-8
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