Topological encoding method for data-driven photonics inverse design.

Data-driven approaches have been proposed as effective strategies for the inverse design and optimization of photonic structures in recent years. In order to assist data-driven methods for the design of topology of photonic devices, we propose a topological encoding method that transforms photonic structures represented by binary images to a continuous sparse representation. This sparse representation can be utilized for dimensionality reduction and dataset generation, enabling effective analysis and optimization of photonic topologies with data-driven approaches. As a proof of principle, we leverage our encoding method for the design of two dimensional non-paraxial diffractive optical elements with various diffraction intensity distributions. We proved that our encoding method is able to assist machine-learning-based inverse design approaches for accurate and global optimization. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement