Spectral imaging is the art of quantifying the spectral and spatial characteristics of a scene. The current state of the art in spectral imaging comprises a wide range of applications and sensor designs. At the extremes are spectrometers with high spectral sampling over a limited number of imaging pixels and those with little spectral sampling over a large number of pixels. The predominant technical issue concerns the acquisition of the three-dimensional spectral imagery (X,Y,l) using an inherently two-dimensional imaging array; consequently, some form of multiplexing must be implemented. This paper will discuss a new class of sensors, broadly referred to as Spectral Temporal Sensors (STS), which capture the position and spectra of uncued point sources anywhere in the optical field. These sensors have large numbers of pixels (>512x512) and colors (>50). They can be used to sense explosions, combustion, rocket plumes, LASERs, LEDs, LASER/LED excitations and the outputs of fiber optic cables. This paper will highlight recent developments on an STS that operates in a Pseudo-imaging (PI) mode, where the location of an uncued dynamic event and its spectral evolution in time are the data products. Here we focus on the sensor's ability to locate the event to within approximately 1/20th pixel, however we will also discuss its capabilities at fully characterizing event spectral temporal signature at rates greater than 100Hz over a large field of view (greater than 30°).

Date Published: 17 March 2005
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 5580, 26th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics, (17 March 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.583486

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5580:
26th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics
Dennis L. Paisley; Stuart Kleinfelder; Donald R. Snyder; Brian J. Thompson, Editor(s)