High-resolution full-stokes polarimetric imaging via inverse-designed non-orthogonal polarization router

Abstract Polarimetric imaging has emerged as a powerful technique for capturing critical surface morphology and material anisotropy information, offering unique advantages including biomedical diagnostics and industrial inspection. However, conventional division-of-focal-plane polarization cameras suffer from low optical efficiency due to filtering losses, and reduced spatial resolution caused by beam splitting redundancy and limited pixel miniaturization. Here, we propose a polarization router based on a field-driven inverse-designed metasurface with non-orthogonal polarization manipulation capability, which can focus four different elliptical polarization states onto designated detector pixels. Leveraging global inverse design, this design achieves high-efficiency, high-resolution and high-precision full-Stokes polarization detection at a wavelength of 1064 nm. Two super-pixel sizes, 10 × 10 μ m and 4.8 × 4.8 μ m (2 × 2 pixel layout), were designed, achieving average optical efficiencies of 78.18% and 80.32%, with polarization reconstruction relative errors of 0.7% and 1.27%, respectively. The comparative analysis of size-dependent performance reveals that despite a significant reduction in dimensions, the optimized metasurface maintains stable performance. This advance paves the way for compact, high-precision real-time polarization imaging systems.