A snapshot light field imaging spectrometer

A light field camera can capture 2D spatial and 2D angular information of light rays from a scene and re-distributes the 4D information on a 2D detector array. The spectrum information can be coupled with angular dimension by placing a spectral filter at the aperture of a light field camera. This construction is a snapshot imaging spectrometer based on light field imaging technology. In this paper, a snapshot light field imaging spectrometer based on a microlens-array is proposed. The principles of system design and discussions of system-tradeoffs are presented. The analysis of diffraction-limited resolution and optical efficiency shows that a mirolens-array based camera is preferred over a pinhole-array based camera for designing a snapshot imaging spectrometer. A prototype and preliminary experimental results are demonstrated.