Fig. 1

Conventional, metalens, and proposed augmentation pipelines. (a) Conventional imaging system: A compound refractive module with multiple lens elements produces high-quality images at the cost of increased axial length and mass. (b) Ultra-compact metalens imaging system: A single metalens yields raw captures with chromatic fringes, field-dependent blur, and spatial distortion; a learned restoration network is required to obtain a conventional-looking image. (c) Proposed augmentation pipeline: A PSF-free, device-conditioned image-to-image translator converts ordinary photographs into metalens-style renders that reproduce chromatic and field-dependent artifacts. The resulting synthetic pairs enable training of restoration models without additional metalens data collection, providing many restored images for downstream analysis.