A notch-mask and dual-prism system for snapshot spectral imaging

In this paper, we present a notch-mask and dual-prism based system for snapshot spectral imaging. Different from traditional spectrometers that utilize band-pass filters or narrow slits to prevent spectral overlap, losing most of the light emitted from the scene, the main idea of our system is to design a spatial notch mask that only occludes the light of sparsely distributed spectral samplings, and introduce a dual-prism architecture to form a non-dispersive RGB measurement on the detector, resulting in the system’s superiority of high light efficiency and high spatial resolution within the snapshot. Then, we develop a model-based algorithm to reconstruct a high-resolution spectral image from the captured RGB measurement, which is of high tolerance to calibration noise since the spectral information can be directly calculated by a minus operation. Simulated experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, and we also build up a prototype system to further demonstrate the practical application and feasibility of our scheme.