A Computational Camera with Programmable Optics for Snapshot High-Resolution Multispectral Imaging

Spectral imaging has many uses in the field of conservation of cultural heritage, medical imaging, etc. It collects spectral information at each location of an image plane as an image cube. Among various approaches, snapshot multispectral imaging techniques measure the cube within one integration period. Previous work has addressed the issue of optical design, while recent developments have shifted the focus towards computation. In this paper, we present a snapshot multispectral imaging technique with a computational camera and a corresponding image restoration algorithm. The main characteristics are: (1) transferring spectral information to the spatial domain by engineering user-defined PSFs; (2) measuring spectral images by computationally inverting the image formation. The design of our computational camera is based on a phase-coded aperture technique to generate spatial and spectral variant PSFs. The corresponding algorithm is designed by adapting single-channel and cross-channel priors. We show experimentally the viability of our technique: it reconstructs high resolution multispectral images from a snapshot. We further validate that the role of PSF design is critical.