Imec Demos 100-band Hyperspectral Sensor

Imec has held demonstration a hyperspectral camera solution with an integrated hyperspectral sensor at SPIE Photonics West on Jan. 24, 2012.

Imec’s hyperspectral sensor consists of a set of spectral filters that are directly post-processed at wafer level on top of CMOSIS CMV4000 sensor (a 4MP sensor with a maximum framerate of 180fps). The hyperspectral filter, developed at imec, has 100 spectral bands between 560nm and 1000nm. The filter bandwidth (Full Width Half Max) ranges from 3nm at 560nm to 20nm at 1000nm, and the transmission efficiency of the filters is around 85%.

The speed of the demonstrated system corresponds to an equivalent speed of 2,000 lines per second, significantly exceeding current state-of-the-art hyperspectral sensors. To match to specific application requirements, the image sensor can be selected (a commercially available sensor or even a custom-designed sensor), determining pixels sizes, maximal frame rate, etc. The hyperspectral filter can be tuned by changing the number of spectral bands and their spectral resolution.

The hyperspectral technology can be very useful in many application domains such as crop screening, food selection, skin cancer detection, target detection, etc.