NEUTRON: Neural particle swarm optimization for material-aware inverse design of structural color

Designing optical structures for generating structural colors is challenging because of the complex relationship between the optical structures and the color perceived by human eyes. Machine learning-based approaches have been developed to expedite this design process. However, existing methods solely focus on structural parameters of the optical design, which could lead to suboptimal color generation because of the inability to optimize the selection of materials. To address this issue, an approach known as Neural Particle Swarm Optimization is proposed in this paper. The proposed method achieves high design accuracy and efficiency on two structural color design tasks; the first task is designing environment-friendly alternatives to chrome coatings, and the second task concerns reconstructing pictures with multilayer optical thin films. Several designs that could replace chrome coatings have been discovered; pictures with more than 200,000 pixels and thousands of unique colors can be accurately reconstructed in a few hours.