Compressive spectral imaging based on colored coded apertures

Compressive spectral imaging (CSI) systems capture the 3D spatio-spectral information of a scene by measuring 2D focal plane array (FPA) coded projections. A reconstruction algorithm exploiting the sparsity of the signal is then used to recover the underlying hyperspectral scene. CSI systems use a set of binary coded apertures, commonly realized through photomasks, to modulate the spatial characteristics of the scene. The reconstruction image quality in CSI is determined by the design of a 2D coded aperture binary set which block or unblock light from the scene onto the detector. This work extends the framework of CSI by replacing the traditional block-unblock photomasks by colored coded apertures which modulate the source not only spatially but spectrally as well. Simulations show a significant improvement in the quality of spectral image reconstructions.