Belgian research lab Imec has demonstrated a prototype hyper-spectral stills and video camera.
Rather than recording red green and blue intensities at each pixel like a conventional colour camera, hyper-spectral imaging records a fine-grained spectral curve at each pixel using a per-pixel narrow band optical filtering.
In this case, the 256x256 sensor has 32band pixels, made by duplicating the incoming image 32 times and projecting these onto different parts of a commercial 2Mpixel CMOS sensor. Light landing on each of the 32 256x256 patches is filtered to a different optical band across 600-1000nm.
The labs describes each 256x256x32 hyper-spectral image as a 'data cube'.
It can video at up to 340cube/s, said Imec: "Being fast, compact and cost-efficient, Imec’s CMOS-based imaging systems with integrated hyper-spectral filters are suited for multiple industrial vision applications."
The organisation also has a line scan hyper-spectral imager, which is being offered to industry now as an evaluation kit for the technique.
This version monolithically integrates hyper-spectral filters on a 4Mpixel, 180frame/s CMOSIS CMV4000 imager.
"It scans 100 spectral bands in the 600-1000nm wavelength range. The filter's full-width half-maximum bandwidth is about 10nm across the spectral range, with a transmission efficiency of around 85%," said Imec. "The speed of the system corresponds to an equivalent speed of 2,000 line/s, significantly exceeding current state-of-the-art hyper-spectral sensors."
The line-scan imager includes all required components, from imager to host PC and software, and can be built into different configurations.
An evaluation kit of the stills and video sensor is planned for later this year.
