Multispectral imaging via nanostructured random broadband filtering.

It is a challenge to acquire a snapshot image of very high resolutions in both spectral and spatial domain via a single short exposure. In this setting one cannot trade time for spectral resolution, such as via spectral bands scanning. Cameras of color filter arrays (CFA) (e.g., the Bayer mosaic) cannot obtain high spectral resolution. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a new multispectral imaging system that makes random linear broadband measurements of the spectrum via a nanostructured multispectral filter array (MSFA). These MSFA random measurements can be used by sparsity-based recovery algorithms to achieve much higher spectral resolution than conventional CFA cameras, without sacrificing spatial resolution. The key innovation is to jointly exploit both spatial and spectral sparsity properties that are inherent to spectral irradiance of natural objects. Experimental results establish the superior performance of the proposed multispectral imaging system over existing ones.