Color plays an important role in human life: without it life would be dull and monochromatic. Printing color with distinct characteristics, like hue, brightness and saturation, and high resolution, are the main characteristic of image sensing devices. A flexible design of color filter is also desired for angle insensitivity and independence of direction of polarization of incident light. Furthermore, it is important that the designed filter be compatible with the image sensing devices in terms of technology and size. Therefore, color filter requires special care in its design, operation and integration. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of nanostructured color filter designs described to date and evaluate them in terms of their performance.

This paper presents an all-dielectric, cascaded, multilayered, thin-film filter, allowing near-infrared filtration for spectral imaging applications. The proposed design is comprised of only eight layers of amorphous silicon (A-Si) and silicon nitride (Si${}_3$N${}_4$), successively deposited on a glass substrate. The finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation results demonstrate a distinct peak in the near-infrared (NIR) region with transmission efficiency up to 70% and a full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) of 77 nm. The theoretical results are angle-insensitive up to ${60}^{°}$ and show polarization insensitivity in the transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) modes. The theoretical response, obtained with the help of spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE), is in good agreement with the experimental result. Likewise, the experimental results for polarization insensitivity and angle invariance of the thin films are in unison with the theoretical results, having an angle invariance up to ${50}^{°}$.