Due to strong atmospheric absorption of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, particularly in the UV-C band, ultraweak UV light at the nW/cm2 level is challenging to detect, sense, and utilize. To address this limitation, we report a 28 × 28 β-Ga2O3 array with enhanced photosensitivity through the introduction of deep-level oxygen vacancies to reconstruct the energy band structure. The array is capable of detecting UV-C radiation as low as 3 nW/cm2, which represents the ultralow reported threshold in the UV-C band to date. Leveraging the array’s exceptional sensitivity and uniform response, we further developed an image preprocessing algorithm to enhance weak UV light imaging. Validation with Fashion-MNIST data set shows a 25% improvement in CNN recognition accuracy. The optimized preprocessing is shown to be critical for complex visual analysis, boosting instance segmentation quality, measured by weighted average intersection over union (IoU), by a remarkable 33%. This demonstrates the array’s potential for practical ultraweak UV-C detection and imaging applications.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.