A Single Sensor Based Multispectral Imaging Camera using a Narrow Spectral Band Colour Mosaic Integrated on the Monochrome CMOS Image Sensor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, cost-effective multispectral imaging camera using a single CMOS sensor with a specialized narrow spectral band colour mosaic, enabling applications in various fields with reduced size and power consumption.

Contribution

It presents a novel single-sensor multispectral camera with a hybrid plasmonic and dielectric filter mosaic, overcoming limitations of traditional multi-sensor systems.

Findings

Significantly reduces size, weight, and power compared to conventional multispectral cameras.

Uses a hybrid plasmonic and dielectric filter mosaic for narrow spectral bands.

Demonstrates effective multispectral imaging with a single CMOS sensor.

Abstract

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 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 image co-registration problem. Here, we demonstrate a single sensor based three band multispectral camera using a narrow spectral band RGB colour mosaic in a Bayer pattern integrated on a monochrome CMOS sensor. The narrow band colour mosaic is made of a hybrid combination of plasmonic colour filters and 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.