Spectral resolution enhancement of hyperspectral imagery by a multiple-aperture compressive optical imaging system

The Coded Aperture Snapshot Spectral Imaging (CASSI) system captures the three-dimensional (3D) spatio-spectral information of a scene using a set of two-dimensional (2D) random-coded Focal Plane Array (FPA) measurements. A compressive sensing reconstruc-tion algorithm is then used to recover the underlying spatio-spectral 3D data cube. The quality of the reconstructed spectral images depends exclusively on the CASSI sensing matrix, which is determined by the structure of a set of random coded apertures. In this paper, the CASSI system is generalized by developing a multiple-aperture optical imaging system such that spectral resolution en-hancement is attainable. In the proposed system, a pair of high-resolution coded apertures is introduced into the CASSI system, allow-ing it to encode both spatial and spectral characteristics of the hyperspectral image. This approach allows the reconstruction of super-resolved hyperspectral data cubes, where the number of spectral bands is significantly increased and the quality in the spatial domain is greatly improved. Extensively simulated experiments show a gain in the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), along with a better fit of the reconstructed spectral signatures to the original spectral data.