Cost-efficient Active Illumination Camera For Hyper-spectral Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, compact active illumination camera designed for hyperspectral imaging, demonstrating its effectiveness in plant root imaging and spectral reconstruction using a U-Net model, thus broadening application accessibility.

Contribution

Introduction of a cost-effective, easy-to-use active illumination camera with a trained spectral reconstruction model, enabling hyperspectral data acquisition without complex equipment.

Findings

Successfully reconstructed hyperspectral data from multi-spectral input.

Demonstrated applicability in plant root imaging.

Camera provides additional spectral information over RGB cameras.

Abstract

Hyper-spectral imaging has recently gained increasing attention for use in different applications, including agricultural investigation, ground tracking, remote sensing and many other. However, the high cost, large physical size and complicated operation process stop hyperspectral cameras from being employed for various applications and research fields. In this paper, we introduce a cost-efficient, compact and easy to use active illumination camera that may benefit many applications. We developed a fully functional prototype of such camera. With the hope of helping with agricultural research, we tested our camera for plant root imaging. In addition, a U-Net model for spectral reconstruction was trained by using a reference hyperspectral camera's data as ground truth and our camera's data as input. We demonstrated our camera's ability to obtain additional information over a typical RGB camera. In addition, the ability to reconstruct hyperspectral data from multi-spectral input makes our device compatible to models and algorithms developed for hyperspectral applications with no modifications required.