Summary: | Depth imaging is very important for many emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles and facial recognition. However, all these applications demand compact and low-power systems that are beyond the capabilities of most state-of-art depth cameras. Recently, metasurface-based depth imaging that exploits point spread function (PSF) engineering has been demonstrated to be miniaturized and single shot without requiring active illumination or multiple viewpoint exposures. A pair of spatially adjacent metalenses with an extended depth-of-field (EDOF) PSF and a depth-sensitive double-helix PSF (DH-PSF) were used, using the former metalens to reconstruct clear images of each depth and the latter to accurately estimate depth. However, due to these two metalenses being non-coaxial, parallax in capturing scenes is inevitable, which would limit the depth precision and field of view. In this work, a bifunctional reconfigurable metalens for 3D depth imaging was proposed by dynamically switching between EDOF-PSF and DH-PSF. Specifically, a polarization-independent metalens working at 1550 nm with a compact 1 mm<sup>2</sup> aperture was realized, which can generate a focused accelerating beam and a focused rotating beam at the phase transition of crystalline and amorphous Ge<sub>2</sub>Sb<sub>2</sub>Te<sub>5</sub> (GST), respectively. Combined with the deconvolution algorithm, we demonstrated the good capabilities of scene reconstruction and depth imaging using a theoretical simulation and achieved a depth measurement error of only 3.42%.
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