Angularly multiplexed spectral imager

Abstract

A spectral imager constructs a 3D (two spatial and one spectral) image from a series of 2D images. This paper discusses a technique for spectral imaging that multiplexes the spatial and spectral information on the focal plane, then demultiplexes the resulting imagery to obtain the spectral image. The resulting spectral image consists of 184 X 184 spatial pixels and 40 spectral bands. The current implementation operates over the 3-5 micrometers band, but can easily be applied to other spectral regions. A hardware description, the mathematical development and experimental results are presented.