Handheld snapshot multi-spectral camera at tens-of-megapixel resolution

Abstract Multi-spectral imaging is a fundamental tool characterizing the constituent energy of scene radiation. However, current multi-spectral video cameras cannot scale up beyond megapixel resolution due to optical constraints and the complexity of the reconstruction algorithms. To circumvent the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weihang Zhang, Jinli Suo, Kaiming Dong, Lianglong Li, Xin Yuan, Chengquan Pei, Qionghai Dai
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2023-08-01
Series:Nature Communications
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40739-3
Description
Summary:Abstract Multi-spectral imaging is a fundamental tool characterizing the constituent energy of scene radiation. However, current multi-spectral video cameras cannot scale up beyond megapixel resolution due to optical constraints and the complexity of the reconstruction algorithms. To circumvent the above issues, we propose a tens-of-megapixel handheld multi-spectral videography approach (THETA), with a proof-of-concept camera achieving 65-megapixel videography of 12 wavebands within visible light range. The high performance is brought by multiple designs: We propose an imaging scheme to fabricate a thin mask for encoding spatio-spectral data using a conventional film camera. Afterwards, a fiber optic plate is introduced for building a compact prototype supporting pixel-wise encoding with a large space-bandwidth product. Finally, a deep-network-based algorithm is adopted for large-scale multi-spectral data decoding, with the coding pattern specially designed to facilitate efficient coarse-to-fine model training. Experimentally, we demonstrate THETA’s advantageous and wide applications in outdoor imaging of large macroscopic scenes.
ISSN:2041-1723