Phase grating from ordered polymer lattices for optica image preprocessing.

The 'inverted' retina of the human eye can beemulated by multilayer gratings from polymer latexparticles located in the image plane of opticalsystems. This so called OPTO-RETINA provides v. Laueinterference patterns in visible light with atrichromatic characteristic containing,simultaneously, local spatiotemporal direction anddistance information, which are relevant to 3Dspatial vision and 4D spatiotemporal Fouriercorrelator-optical preprocessing in shape andmotion analysis.As a first step in the realization of OPTO-RETINAproperties the formation of hexagonally orderedmonolayers of polystyrene latex sphereswith diameters in the~μm range is reported and firstresults of diffraction and dispersion of white lightby these layers obtained by conoscopical opticalmicroscopy are presented.