Building a Two-Way Hyperspectral Imaging System with Liquid Crystal Tunable Filters

Liquid crystal tunable filters can provide rapid and vibrationless section of any wavelength in transmitting spectrum so that they have been broadly used in building multispectral or hyperspectral imaging systems. However, the spectral range of the filters is limited to a certain range, such as visible or near-infrared spectrum. In general hyperspectral imaging applications, we are therefore forced to choose a certain range of target spectrum, either visible or near-infrared for instance. Owing to the nature of polarizing optical elements, imaging systems combined with multiple tunable filters have been rarely practiced. In this paper, we therefore present our experience of building a two-way hyperspectral imaging system with liquid crystal tunable filters. The system allows us to capture hyperspectral radiance continuously from visible to near-infrared spectrum (400—1100 nm at 7 nm intervals), which is 2.3 times wider and 34 times more channels compared to a common RGB camera. We report how we handle the multiple polarizing elements to extend the spectral range of the imager with the multiple tunable filters and propose an affine-based method to register the hyperspectral image channels of each wavelength.