Dual-camera design for hyperspectral and panchromatic imaging, using a wedge shaped liquid crystal as a spectral multiplexer.

In this paper, we present a new hyperspectral compact camera which is designed to have high spatial and spectral resolutions, to be vibrations tolerant, and to achieve state-of-the-art high optical throughput values compared to existing nanosatellite hyperspectral imaging payloads with space heritage. These properties make it perfect for airborne and spaceborne remote sensing tasks. The camera has both hyperspectral and panchromatic imaging capabilities, achieved by employing a wedge-shaped liquid crystal cell together with computational image processing.

Fast Method for Liquid Crystal Cell Spatial Variations Estimation Based on Modeling the Spectral Transmission.

Liquid crystal phase retarders are utilized by photonic devices and imaging systems for various applications, such as tunable filtering, light modulation, polarimetric imaging, remote sensing and quality inspection. Due to technical difficulties in the manufacturing process, these phase retarders may suffer from spatial non-uniformities, which degrade the performance of the systems. These non-uniformities can be characterized by measuring the spectral transmission at each voltage and each point on the liquid crystal cell, which is time consuming.