High-throughput hyperspectral infrared camera

A spectral imager constructs a three-dimensional (two spatial and one spectral) image from a series of two-dimensional images. We discuss a technique for spectral imaging that multiplexes the spatial and spectral information on a staring focal plane and then demultiplexes the resulting imagery to obtain the spectral image. The spectral image consists of 100 x 100 spatial pixels and 25 spectral bands. The current implementation operates over the 3-5-mu m band, but can easily be applied to other spectral regions. This approach to spectral imaging has high optical throughput and is robust to focal plane array nonuniformities. A hardware description, the mathematical development, and experimental results are presented. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.