Spectral Reconstruction From Dispersive Blur: A Novel Light Efficient Spectral Imager

Developing high light efficiency imaging techniques to retrieve high dimensional optical signal is a long-term goal in computational photography. Multispectral imaging, which captures images of different wavelengths and boosting the abilities for revealing scene properties, has developed rapidly in the last few decades. From scanning method to snapshot imaging, the limit of light collection efficiency is kept being pushed which enables wider applications especially under the light-starved scenes. In this work, we propose a novel multispectral imaging technique, that could capture the multispectral images with a high light efficiency. Through investigating the dispersive blur caused by spectral dispersers and introducing the difference of blur (DoB) constraints, we propose a basic theory for capturing multispectral information from a single dispersive-blurred image and an additional spectrum of an arbitrary point in the scene. Based on the theory, we design a prototype system and develop an optimization algorithm to realize snapshot multispectral imaging. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on both the synthetic data and real captured images.