Description:
Background
- Cone cells are natural photoreceptor cells in the retinas of vertebrate eyes
- They respond differently to the light of different wavelengths, which are responsible for color vision, a sensation in our brain in response to the incidence of mixed wavelength values (i.e. nonmonochromatic light) incident on the cone cells
- Similarly, this nanotechnology/AI-enabled system will be able to accurately identify colors from different sources
Technology Overview
Northeastern researchers have developed a prototype that performs color perception as follows: It collects the optical transmittance and/or optoelectronic photocurrent of a light source by allowing the light to pass through a few nanomaterial filters and then shine on one or a few photodetectors. Then runs in a newly developed machine learning code to analyze the collected data and determine the color combination of the light.
Benefits
- Can detect the color combinations of a light source
- The device can be miniaturized into a few micrometers
- Low cost
Applications
- Manufacturers of automation hardware for self-driving vehicles, industrial process control
- Manufacturers of robotic vision hardware
- Manufacturers of Food and Drug industry analysis tools
- Manufacturers or analytics tools beyond optics, such as X-ray, XPS, Radionuclide identification
Opportunity
- License
- Partnering
- Research collaboration