A multispectral image camera captures image data within specific wavelength ranges in narrow wavelength bands across the electromagnetic spectrum. Images from a multispectral camera can extract a additional information that the human eye or a normal camera fails to capture and thus may have important applications in precision agriculture, forestry, medicine, and object identification. Conventional multispectral cameras are made up of multiple image sensors each fitted with a narrow passband wavelength filter and optics, which makes them heavy, bulky, power hungry, and very expensive. The multiple optics also create an image co-registration problem. Here, we demonstrate a single sensor based three band multispectral camera using a narrow spectral band red–green–blue color mosaic in a Bayer pattern integrated on a monochrome CMOS sensor. The narrow band color mosaic is made of a hybrid combination of plasmonic color filters and a heterostructured dielectric multilayer. The demonstrated camera technology has reduced cost, weight, size, and power by almost n times (where n is the number of bands) compared to a conventional multispectral camera.

Plasmonic color filters based on the hexagonal arrangement of coaxial hole array in aluminum have been demonstrated as a promising candidate for color filter development due to polarization and incident angle insensitivity. They also comprise a single nanometer thick metal film, demonstrate good line width, CMOS compatibility, and fine color tunability. However, the low transmittance of the coaxial hole array based filters limits their use in potential applications such as image sensors and displays. This paper introduces a new method to increase transmittance in coaxial hole array based filters by tuning localized surface plasmons and surface plasmon polaritons. In this method, coaxial holes of small diameters are filled along with a large size coaxial hole array to form a combined filter geometry with optimized parameters in aluminum film using computational techniques. The simulation results will have potential applications in CMOS image sensors, submicron pixel development, microdisplays, and liquid crystal over silicon devices.

The CMY colour camera is different from the RGB counterpart where the subtractive colours cyan, magenta and yellow are used. The CMY camera performs better than an RGB camera in low light conditions. However, conventional CMY colour filter technology made of pigments and dyes are limited in performance for next generation image sensors with submicron pixel sizes. This is because the conventional CMY filters cannot be fabricated in nanoscale as they use their absorption properties to subtract colours. This paper presents a CMOS compatible nanoscale thick CMY colour mosaic made of Al-TiO₂-Al nanorods forming a total number of 0.82 million colour filter pixels with each filter pixel size of 4.4 µm arranged in a CMYM pattern. The colour mosaic was then integrated on a MT9P031 image sensor to make a CMY camera and colour imaging is demonstrated using a 12 colour Macbeth chart. The developed technology will have applications in astronomy, low exposure time imaging in biology, and photography.

Dichroic circular polarizers (DCP) represent an important group of optical filters that transfer only that part of the incident light with the desired polarization state and absorb the remainder. However, DCPs are usually bulky and exhibit significant optical loss. Moreover, the integration of these kinds of DCP devices can be difficult and costly as different compositions of chemicals are needed to achieve the desired polarization status. Circular polarizers based on metasurfaces require only thin films in the order of hundreds of nanometers but are limited by their sensitivity to angle of incidence. Furthermore, few existing solutions offer broadband operation in the visible range. By using computational simulations, this paper proposes and analyses a plasmonic DCP structure operating in the visible, from 400 nm to 700 nm which overcomes these drawbacks. The resulting circular dichroism transmission (CDT) is more than 0.9, and the maximum transmission efficiency is greater than 78% at visible wavelengths. These CDT characteristics are largely independent of angle of incidence up to angles of 80 degrees.