Color | EPFL Graph Search

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorption, reflection, emission spectra and interference. For most humans, color are perceived in the visible light spectrum with three types of cone cells (trichromacy). Other animals may have a different number of cone cell types or have eyes sensitive to different wavelength, such as bees that can distinguish ultraviolet, and thus have a different color sensitivity range. Animal perception of color originates from different light wavelength or spectral sensitivity in cone cell types, which is then processed by the brain. Colors have perceived properties such as hue, colorfulness (saturation) and luminance. Colors can also be additively mixed (commonly used for actual light) or subtractively mixed (commonly used for materials). If the colors are mixed in the ri

Up-scalable plasmonic and diffractive nanostructures

Fabian Michael Lütolf

Since most of the academic photonic and plasmonic nanostructures are based on slow and expensive electron beam lithography processes, there is a need for innovative alternatives suitable for industrial manufacturing. Large areas need to be patterned with a high throughput, which is for example achieved with roll-to-roll machines. Up-scalable designs of photonic and plasmonic nanostructures are therefore studied in this thesis. Typical industrial processes include embossing and evaporation, which are consequently used throughout the thesis. I propose oblique evaporation of high refractive index materials to render binary gratings highly efficient for first order transmission. Zinc sulfide coatings are employed to diffract close to 70% of unpolarized green light. Simulations further show that they can be encapsulated to protect them from environmental influences like humidity, wear or dust, while retaining their exceptional diffractive properties, which is very appealing for outdoor applications. I also show that thin metallic coatings can attain similar efficiencies for TE polarized light. The effect is asymmetric and shows a maximum at the Wood-Rayleigh anomaly, which results in orientation dependent coloration of the zero order as well as first order transmittances. A large part of the standard RGB gamut can be covered through proper adjustment of the grating parameters. Combination of zero order and first order effects allows creation of color appearances that switch when rotating or flipping the device. I finally present how floating images become apparent when a patterned light source like e.g. a mobile phone is used in conjunction with the metallized grating. Direct transfer of plasmonic technology from universities to industry is often not possible: in academia, metallic nanostructures often require a lateral resolution of a few nanometers, which is challenging to achieve in up-scalable processes. Thicknesses on the other hand can be controlled in this regime using evaporation techniques, which are hence powerful methods for high-throughput production. In this thesis, Fano-resonant, U-shaped nanowires are created with oblique metal deposition. In order to make them available for mass-production, aluminum is chosen as the plasmonic material. The surface integral equation method is used to investigate near-fields and charge distributions, which shed light onto the physics behind the present resonances. A surface plasmon polariton is found to couple to a localized plasmonic mode with a hexapolar charge distribution. It is finally shown that the Fano-resonance can be accurately tuned by adapting evaporation angle and metal thickness. These two parameters can easily be accessed and would allow for good control over the optical response even in an industrial environment. The applicability of the above insights is then demonstrated by creating a strain sensor. To that end, the process is transferred to a stretchable polymer and when elongating the structure perpendicular to the wires, the polymeric spacing between them is expanded. The sensitivity of the Fano-resonance to this change in inter-wire distance is investigated and a strong damping is observed. Through careful design, a clearly visible color switch from purple to green is achieved for elongations less than 20%. The sensor was deemed to be very durable, as no deterioration in the color or the spectral response was observed even after several strain cycles.

EPFL2015

Joint Acquisition of Color and Near-Infrared Images on a Single Sensor

Zahra Sadeghipoor Kermani

In the past few years, fusing NIR and color images has been explored in general computational photography and computer vision tasks, where traditionally only color images are used. The additional information provided by the differences of light and scene reflections in the visible and NIR bands of the electromagnetic spectrum is used in several applications such as image denoising, image dehazing, shadow detection and removal, and high dynamic-range imaging. In this thesis, we study a system that simultaneously captures color and NIR images on a single silicon sensor. Such a camera could be manufactured with minor changes in the hardware of consumer color cameras and it could be integrated inside small devices such as cell phones. We address two main challenges in color and NIR acquisition. First, we study the spatial and spectral sampling of the scene, which is inevitable in single-sensor acquisition of multiple spectral channels. We then focus on chromatic aberration distortions. Similarly to color imaging, we use a color filter array (CFA) to sample the scene in visible and NIR bands. We address two main challenges regarding the CFA: (1) designing the CFA, and (2) developing a demosaicing algorithm to reconstruct full-resolution images from the subsampled measurements. We consider a general CFA with filters that transmit different mixtures of color and NIR channels. We develop a framework that, by exploiting the spatial and spectral correlations of color and NIR images, computes the transmittance of each filter and the demosaicing matrix. Our optimized CFA and demosaicing outperform other solutions developed for single-sensor color and NIR acquisition. We also investigate a CFA that is formed by one blue, one green, one red, and one NIR-pass filter. We call it the RGBN CFA and assume that, similarly to color cameras, it uses dye filters that do not have sharp cut-offs. Hence, color and NIR radiations leak into NIR and color filters, respectively. We devise an algorithm that reconstructs full-resolution images from mixed and subsampled sensor measurements. The RGBN CFA and our reconstruction algorithm perform as well as or even better than other single-sensor acquisition techniques that use more complicated hardware components. The problem of chromatic aberration is caused by deficiencies of optical elements. A simple lens converges light rays with different wavelengths at different distances from the lens. Hence, if the color image is in focus and sharp on the sensor plane, the NIR image captured with the same focus settings is out of focus and blurred. We propose an algorithm that retrieves the lost details in NIR using the gradients of the sharp color image. As the high-frequency details of color and NIR images are not strongly correlated in all image patches, our method locally adapts the contribution of color gradients in deblurring. To achieve this, we develop a multiscale scheme that iterates between deblurring NIR and estimating the correlation between color and NIR high-frequency components. Our algorithm outperforms both blind and guided deblurring approaches. We also design a method that estimates a dense blur-kernel map when the severity of chromatic aberration changes as the depths of objects vary across the image. Our method performs better than the competing methods both in estimating the blur-kernel map and in deblurring.

EPFL2015

Metallized Gratings Enable Color Effects and Floating Screen Films by First-Order Diffraction

Fabian Michael Lütolf, Olivier Martin

A new concept for generating visual effects with metallized gratings is introduced. Shadow evaporation of aluminum onto dielectric gratings is shown to produce strongly asymmetric color effects. Zero-order effects are combined with +/- first-order transmission in the present structures to generate not only polarization but also orientation-dependent colors. We show that a wide palette of colors can be obtained by simply scaling the parameters of the dielectric base grating. The present approach therefore enables the fabrication of entire asymmetric images in a two-step process. Additionally, a floating screen film is created by placing the grating at an increased distance to the light source. The present structures could find applications as security or decorative elements and are well suited for mass production using high-throughput techniques such as roll-to-roll fabrication.

2015

Joint Acquisition of Color and Near-Infrared Images on a Single Sensor

Zahra Sadeghipoor Kermani

EPFL2015

Up-scalable plasmonic and diffractive nanostructures

Fabian Michael Lütolf

EPFL2015