Miniature Snapshot Multispectral Imager

Multispectral imagers use an optical device that can separate the colors to obtain the spectral content in the scene. Such an optical device could be a grating or prism, a filter wheel, a diffractive optic lens, a Fabry-Perot (F-P) etalon, or a tunable filter. All of these optical devices are used with a focal plane array (FPA) and suitable optics for a given spectral region. All such imagers collect images in a time-sequential manner. Recently, some multispectral imagers have been developed that collect images of the scene at all the spectral bands simultaneously.