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Low Cost Hyperspectral Imaging System

Personal Project

This is the latest from a series of projects where I developed optical instruments with minimized expenses to improve accessibility in R&D and education by building upon the latest developments in open-source builds as alternatives to expensive instruments. Additionally, I explored the capabilities of pairing additive manufacturing with optical system manufacturing.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has broad applications in biomedical imaging, computer vision, and agriculture. However, professional grade hyperspectral cameras can exceed thousands of dollars. My goal for this project was to design HSI system at a low cost while maintaining good performance and maintaining Near-Infrared sensitivity. The optical system was designed in Zemax OpticStudio and allowed me to estimate the resolution of the device in terms of the aberrations and diffraction-limit. The total cost of the camera itself was a little more than $300. This work was based on similar projects documented in scientific literature but has notable changes to reduce the costs such as integrating the Raspberry Pi High Quality camera and a CCTV telephoto lens. The theoretical spectral range of the device is from 400nm to 1000nm. In the future I will be fabricating and testing the device and developing a software to process data.