Engineers at Imec (Heverlee, Belgium) have developed a hyperspectral imaging system for industrial vision applications that is based on a CMOS image sensor and hyperspectral filters.
Imec's hyperspectral imaging system captures an entire multispectral image at one discrete point in time. To do so, the imager makes use of hyperspectral filter structures laid out in a tiled array on top of a commercially-available CMV2000 2Mpixel, 340fps CMOS-based image sensor from CMOSIS (Antwerp, Belgium).
The hyperspectral imaging system simultaneously duplicates a scene onto each filter tile, acquiring multispectral image cubes of 256x256 pixels over 32 bands in the spectral range of 600-1000nm at up to 340 cubes/sec.
Recently, engineers at the company posted a video on Vimeo of the hyperspectral imager operating at video-rates. In the video, spectral signatures of different type of leaves across 32 different spectral bands were captured in parallel at 60 datacubes/sec and analyzed in real-time with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) discrimination algorithms.
The video can be viewed here. More details on the Imec system can be found here.
Related news items on hyperspectral imaging from Vision Systems Design that you might also find of interest.
1. Hyperspectral imaging system sorts seeds
A Swiss company has developed a hyperspectral imaging system that can transport, analyze and sort grains, seeds or beans at over 50 per second according to their biochemical composition and/or external traits such as color.
2. Hyperspectral imaging checks cod for quality
A PhD student from the University of Tromsø in Norway has developed a hyperspectral imaging system that can automatically inspect cod fillets.
3. Hyperspectral imaging detects the dead
Scientists at the NRC Institute for Aerospace Research (Ottawa, ON, Canada) are investigating whether hyperspectral imaging could be used to locate missing persons who have been buried in graves.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
