Metasurface-Enabled Dual-Channel Single-Pixel Polarimetric Imaging

Single-pixel imaging has garnered significant interest across a variety of research domains due to its cost-effectiveness and adaptability. Metasurfaces, with their subwavelength-scale structures, offer flexible control ability, enabling them to be an ideal platform for single-pixel imaging applications. This study introduces an innovative single-pixel imaging technique that leverages polarization multiplexing metasurfaces to enable dual orthogonal polarization channel imaging from a single measurement. By incorporating four units with varying structural dimensions, 2-bit encoding of the incident light is achieved. Through spatial shifting, images corresponding to different polarization channels with various spatial amplitude masks are encoded independently, resulting in high-quality single-pixel imaging. This multifunctional metasurface streamlines conventional polarization-based single-pixel systems, reducing both time and spatial costs with a single measurement, while achieving a spatial resolution of 4.38 µm in reconstructed images. This innovative approach to polarimetric single-pixel imaging holds great potential for optical detection, target recognition, aviation, and other advanced applications.