Snapshot colored compressive spectral imager.

Traditional spectral imaging approaches require sensing all the voxels of a scene. Colored mosaic FPA detector-based architectures can acquire sets of the scene's spectral components, but the number of spectral planes depends directly on the number of available filters used on the FPA, which leads to reduced spatiospectral resolutions. Instead of sensing all the voxels of the scene, compressive spectral imaging (CSI) captures coded and dispersed projections of the spatiospectral source. This approach mitigates the resolution issues by exploiting optical phenomena in lenses and other elements, which, in turn, compromise the portability of the devices. This paper presents a compact snapshot colored compressive spectral imager (SCCSI) that exploits the benefits of the colored mosaic FPA detectors and the compression capabilities of CSI sensing techniques. The proposed optical architecture has no moving parts and can capture the spatiospectral information of a scene in a single snapshot by using a dispersive element and a color-patterned detector. The optical and the mathematical models of SCCSI are presented along with a testbed implementation of the system. Simulations and real experiments show the accuracy of SCCSI and compare the reconstructions with those of similar CSI optical architectures, such as the CASSI and SSCSI systems, resulting in improvements of up to 6 dB and 1 dB of PSNR, respectively.