Wide-angle computational imaging spectroscopy method and apparatus

Abstract

A system for computational imaging spectroscopy to provide compact and lightweight design, as well as large field of view of an object to be captured. The system includes imaging components, and computational device. The imaging components includes lens assembly, a fixed or variable-diameter aperture, spectral filter array and imaging sensor. The lens assembly provides wide angle of view, image-side telecentricity, and further may correct for longitudinal chromatic aberrations. The lens assembly may not provide correction of lateral chromatic aberrations. Furthermore, the lens assembly provides image-space telecentricity so as to chief rays are incident perpendicular to image sensor. The lens assembly may produce different chromatic aberrations pattern for each wavelength within the spectral range of interest. The pass-band nanofilter array is configured to filter a plurality of specific bands of light reflected from the imaged object and further produces a plurality of spatio-spectral samples of the imaged object projected onto the photosensitive pixels of imaging sensor. The computational device reconstructs complete spectral cube within the spectral range of interest, and further enables the computation of object reflectance at each pixel of the captured image from the plurality of spatio-spectral samples registered by the imaging sensor.