Compressive Sensing Hyperspectral Imager in the LWIR
Capability Description: PSI has developed an environmentally hardened compressive sensing hyperspectral imager (CS-HSI) operating in the LWIR. The CS-HSI employs a single pixel architecture achieving an order of magnitude cost reduction relative to conventional HSIs employing an LWIR cooled focal plane array (FPA). A low-cost digital micromirror device is used to spatially encode the image of the scene and a Fabry-Perot tunable filter in conjunction with a single element photodetector is used to spectrally resolve the spatially compressed data. A CS processing module reconstructs the spatially compressed spectral data, where the module has been specifically tailored to chemical plume imaging. An automated target recognition algorithm is applied to the reconstructed hyperspectral data to detect and track chemical plumes in cluttered and dynamic backgrounds.
Benefit to Warfighter
Wide area persistent surveillance of chemical plumes at a 10x cost reduction relative to the state of the art.