In-Sensor Compressed Imaging with Reconstruction-Free Recognition via Ferroelectric Photodiodes.

Yan, Tao; Cai, Yuchen; Wang, Can; Li, Shuhui; Yao, Xiaokang; Wang, Rui; Zhan, Xueying; Guo, Erjia et al. · Nano Lett · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The transition from human-centric to machine-centric vision systems demands innovative imaging architectures. Compressed imaging, using key mathematical transformations to capture essential visual information during sampling, is suited for sensor-level integration to minimize data redundancy. Here, we propose an efficient machine vision strategy that connects in-sensor compressed imaging with neural networks. By manipulating ferroelectric polarization, BiFeO<sub>3</sub> photodiodes exhibit 113 to 274 nonvolatile photoresponse states with good stability, linearity, and an 85% yield across 150 devices. The Hadamard product between the devices and image matrices transforms the input images from the spatial to the Haar wavelet domain, enabling in-sensor compression by discarding high-frequency coefficients. The compressed data are directly fed into neural networks, bypassing image reconstruction, and achieve a simulated accuracy of 87.0% at 0.04 compression ratio and 95.8% at 0.9. This approach merges image sensing and compression within the ferroelectric sensors, integrating reconstruction-free deep processing for an efficient machine vision solution.