Cost-efficient Active Illumination Camera For Hyper-spectral Reconstruction
This addresses the problem of making hyperspectral imaging more accessible for applications like agricultural research, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing camera and reconstruction methods.
The authors tackled the high cost and complexity of hyperspectral imaging by developing a cost-efficient, active illumination camera, demonstrating its ability to provide additional information over RGB cameras and reconstruct hyperspectral data from multispectral input using a U-Net model.
Hyper-spectral imaging has recently gained increasing attention for use in different applications, including agricultural investigation, ground tracking, remote sensing and many other. However, the high cost, large physical size and complicated operation process stop hyperspectral cameras from being employed for various applications and research fields. In this paper, we introduce a cost-efficient, compact and easy to use active illumination camera that may benefit many applications. We developed a fully functional prototype of such camera. With the hope of helping with agricultural research, we tested our camera for plant root imaging. In addition, a U-Net model for spectral reconstruction was trained by using a reference hyperspectral camera's data as ground truth and our camera's data as input. We demonstrated our camera's ability to obtain additional information over a typical RGB camera. In addition, the ability to reconstruct hyperspectral data from multi-spectral input makes our device compatible to models and algorithms developed for hyperspectral applications with no modifications required.