APL Photonics (Apr 2020)

A single sensor based multispectral imaging camera using a narrow spectral band color mosaic integrated on the monochrome CMOS image sensor

  • Xin He,
  • Yajing Liu,
  • Kumar Ganesan,
  • Arman Ahnood,
  • Paul Beckett,
  • Fatima Eftekhari,
  • Dan Smith,
  • Md Hemayet Uddin,
  • Efstratios Skafidas,
  • Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas,
  • Ranjith Rajasekharan Unnithan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5140215
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 4
pp. 046104 – 046104-10

Abstract

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A multispectral image camera captures image data within specific wavelength ranges in narrow wavelength bands across the electromagnetic spectrum. Images from a multispectral camera can extract a additional information that the human eye or a normal camera fails to capture and thus may have important applications in precision agriculture, forestry, medicine, and object identification. Conventional multispectral cameras are made up of multiple image sensors each fitted with a narrow passband wavelength filter and optics, which makes them heavy, bulky, power hungry, and very expensive. The multiple optics also create an image co-registration problem. Here, we demonstrate a single sensor based three band multispectral camera using a narrow spectral band red–green–blue color mosaic in a Bayer pattern integrated on a monochrome CMOS sensor. The narrow band color mosaic is made of a hybrid combination of plasmonic color filters and a heterostructured dielectric multilayer. The demonstrated camera technology has reduced cost, weight, size, and power by almost n times (where n is the number of bands) compared to a conventional multispectral camera.