The information from a scene is critical in autonomous optical systems, and the variety of information that can be extracted is determined by the application. To characterize a target, the information of interest captured is spectral (λ), polarization (S) and distance (Z). There are many technologies that capture this information in different ways to identify the target. In many fields, such as mining and military reconnaissance, there is a need for rapid data acquisition and, for this reason, a relatively new method has been devised that can obtain all this information simultaneously. The need for snapshot acquisition of data without moving parts was the goal of the research. This paper reviews the chain of novel research instruments that were sequentially developed to capture spectral and polarization information of a scene in a snapshot or flash. The distance (Z) is yet to be integrated.

Date Published: 5 September 2014
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 9186, Fifty Years of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona, 91860L (5 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2063979

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9186:
Fifty Years of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona
Harrison H. Barrett; John E. Greivenkamp; Eustace L. Dereniak, Editor(s)