Implementation of a 3-D Hyperspectral Instrument for Skin Imaging Applications

The many bands acquired by typical multispectral, hyperspectral, and ultraspectral instruments are collected in either a scanning or staring fashion. Staring instruments, like that described in this paper, are popular because they are capable of producing spatially coherent images of a target scene; therefore, they are suitable for noncontact inspection applications. However, the wavebands need to be coregistered. A new application of hyperspectral instrumentation is proposed, where a sheet-of-light method, produced by a low-power laser light, is used to compute range measurements, and a hyperspectral instrument is used to acquire spectral information in the visible (VIS) range of the spectrum. The main advantage of this method is that a single hyperspectral tunable filter arrangement is used to sweep the image to get 3-D information and acquire hyperspectral spectral measurements of a scene. This paper describes the implementation of the image acquisition subsystem, which was done in LabView, and the method used to obtain coregistered radiometrically calibrated spectral imagery and range information. Test cases showed that the instrument may be used to retrieve height and spectral information of small areas and could be used for skin-imaging applications.