Spectral DiffuserCam: lensless snapshot hyperspectral imaging with a spectral filter array
This addresses the need for accessible snapshot hyperspectral imaging in applications like medical diagnostics and agriculture, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing lensless and computational techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of slow and expensive hyperspectral imaging by proposing a compact, inexpensive computational camera using a spectral filter array and diffuser, achieving high spatio-spectral resolution with sub-super-pixel recovery.
Hyperspectral imaging is useful for applications ranging from medical diagnostics to agricultural crop monitoring; however, traditional scanning hyperspectral imagers are prohibitively slow and expensive for widespread adoption. Snapshot techniques exist but are often confined to bulky benchtop setups or have low spatio-spectral resolution. In this paper, we propose a novel, compact, and inexpensive computational camera for snapshot hyperspectral imaging. Our system consists of a tiled spectral filter array placed directly on the image sensor and a diffuser placed close to the sensor. Each point in the world maps to a unique pseudorandom pattern on the spectral filter array, which encodes multiplexed spatio-spectral information. By solving a sparsity-constrained inverse problem, we recover the hyperspectral volume with sub-super-pixel resolution. Our hyperspectral imaging framework is flexible and can be designed with contiguous or non-contiguous spectral filters that can be chosen for a given application. We provide theory for system design, demonstrate a prototype device, and present experimental results with high spatio-spectral resolution.