Hyperspectral Imaging Bioinspired by Chromatic Blur Vision in Color Blind Animals

Abstract

Hyperspectral imaging remote sensing is mutually restricted in terms of spatial and spectral resolutions, signal-to-noise ratio and exposure time. To deal with this trade-off properly, it is beneficial for imaging systems to have high light flux. In this paper, we put forward a novel hyperspectral imaging method with high light flux bioinspired by chromatic blur vision in color blind animals. We designed a camera lens with high degree of longitudinal chromatic aberration, a monochrome image sensor captured the chromatic blur images at different focal lengths. Finally, by using the known point spread functions of the chromatic blur imaging system, we process these chromatically blurred images by deconvolution based on singular value decomposition inverse filtering, and the spectral images of a target were restored. We constructed three different targets for validating image restoration based on a typical octopus eyeball imaging system. The results show that the proposed imaging method can effectively extract spectral images from the chromatically blurred images. This study can facilitate development of a novel bionic hyperspectral imaging, which may benefit from the high light flux of a large aperture and provide higher detection sensitivity.