Project Blue Jay: Ultra-High-Resolution 3D Imaging with CMOS

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The future of autonomy—spanning robotics, transportation, healthcare, and environmental intelligence—demands sensing systems that are orders of magnitude more capable than those available today, yet at a fraction of the cost. Real-world autonomy requires sensors that can perceive complex, dynamic environments with human-like robustness and precision, while remaining scalable to billions of deployments. Achieving this vision calls for breakthroughs in how we generate, detect, and interpret physical signals across multiple domains.

The ubiquity of standard CMOS image sensors has already transformed digital photography, computational imaging, and computer vision. With over six billion sensors shipped annually, CMOS imagers power applications ranging from smartphones and IoT devices to automotive systems, biomedical instruments, and industrial automation. Despite this remarkable success, many mission-critical applications still demand true 3D perception—a capability current commercial 3D sensors cannot match in resolution, scalability, or cost efficiency compared to CMOS technology. High-performance LiDAR systems, while powerful, face fundamental barriers to large-scale adoption due to their reliance on specialized sensor architectures and the absence of volume manufacturing comparable to CMOS sensors. Additionally, traditional LiDAR tends to be bulky, expensive, and power-hungry, which limits integration into compact and cost-sensitive applications. Their complexity and sensitivity to environmental factors further challenge robust, reliable performance at scale.

In response to this challenge, we introduce a new paradigm for 3D imaging, centered on leveraging standard CMOS image sensors augmented with mass-producible optical components to add the missing third dimension. This approach capitalizes on the more than $100 billion invested over the past two decades in CMOS imaging infrastructure. At the core of our method is an optical intensity modulator— the longitudinal piezoelectric resonant photoelastic modulator—which enables efficient optical phase modulation using compact, low-cost hardware. By converting high-frequency optical phase shifts into signals detectable by conventional image sensors, our approach embeds time-of-flight information directly into standard image capture.

This innovation results in a compact, power-efficient, and highly scalable 3D imaging system that delivers 10×–100× higher spatial resolution than today’s time-of-flight sensors—at a fraction of the cost. This allows our system to open up new application domains for LiDAR—from ultra-precise close-range sensing to high-fidelity long-range detection—expanding the reach of 3D imaging far beyond current limitations. Thus, by uniting optical innovation with CMOS scalability, this technology lays the foundation for a new generation of affordable, high-performance depth sensors capable of powering the next era of autonomous systems.

Publications

[1] O. Atalar and A. Arbabian, "Optically isotropic longitudinal piezoelectric resonant photoelastic modulator for wide angle polarization modulation at megahertz frequencies," Journal of the Optical Society of America A, vol. 40, no. 12, December 2023, pp. 2249-2258.

[2] O. Atalar., R. Van Laer, C.J. Sarabalis, A.H. Safavi-Naeini, and A. Arbabian, "Time-of-flight imaging based on resonant photoelastic modulation," Applied Optics, vol. 58, no. 9, March 2019, pp. 2235-2247. 

[3] O. Atalar, R. Van Laer, A.H. Safavi-Naeini, and A. Arbabian, "Longitudinal piezoelectric resonant photoelastic modulator for efficient intensity modulation at megahertz frequencies," Nature Communications, March 2022. 

[4] O. Atalar, S. Yee, A. H. Safavi-Naeini, and A. Arbabian, "YZ cut lithium niobate longitudinal piezoelectric resonant photoelastic modulator," Optics Express, vol. 30, no. 26, December 2022, pp. 47103-47114.