An integrated imaging sensor for aberration-corrected 3D photography

Planar digital image sensors facilitate broad applications in a wide range of areas 1 – 5 , and the number of pixels has scaled up rapidly in recent years 2 , 6 . However, the practical performance of imaging systems is fundamentally limited by spatially nonuniform optical aberrations originating from imperfect lenses or environmental disturbances 7 , 8 . Here we propose an integrated scanning light-field imaging sensor, termed a meta-imaging sensor, to achieve high-speed aberration-corrected three-dimensional photography for universal applications without additional hardware modifications. Instead of directly detecting a two-dimensional intensity projection, the meta-imaging sensor captures extra-fine four-dimensional light-field distributions through a vibrating coded microlens array, enabling flexible and precise synthesis of complex-field-modulated images in post-processing. Using the sensor, we achieve high-performance photography up to a gigapixel with a single spherical lens without a data prior, leading to orders-of-magnitude reductions in system capacity and costs for optical imaging. Even in the presence of dynamic atmosphere turbulence, the meta-imaging sensor enables multisite aberration correction across 1,000 arcseconds on an 80-centimetre ground-based telescope without reducing the acquisition speed, paving the way for high-resolution synoptic sky surveys. Moreover, high-density accurate depth maps can be retrieved simultaneously, facilitating diverse applications from autonomous driving to industrial inspections.