Dual-channel snapshot imaging spectrometer with wide spectrum and high resolution.

The comprehensive analysis of dynamic targets brings about the demand for capturing spatial and spectral dimensions of visual information instantaneously, which leads to the emergence of snapshot spectral imaging technologies. While current snapshot systems face major challenges in the development of wide working band range as well as high resolution, our novel dual-channel snapshot imaging spectrometer (DSIS), to the best of our knowlledge, demonstrates the capability to achieve both wide spectrum and high resolution in a compact structure. By dint of the interaction between the working band range and field of view (FOV), reasonable limits on FOV are set to avoid spectral overlap. Further, we develop a dual-channel imaging method specifically for DSIS to separate the whole spectral range into two parts, alleviating the spectral overlap on each image surface, improving the tolerance of the system for a wider working band range, and breaking through structural constraints. In addition, an optimal FOV perpendicular to the dispersion direction is determined by the trade-off between FOV and astigmatism. DSIS enables the acquisition of 53×11 spatial elements with up to 250 spectral channels in a wide spectrum from 400 to 795 nm. The theoretical study and optimal design of DSIS are further evaluated through the simulation experiments of spectral imaging.