Snapshot compressive spectral imaging based on adaptive coded apertures

Coded aperture snapshot spectral imager (CASSI) uses focal plane array (FPA) to capture three dimensional (3D) spectral scene by single or a few two-dimensional (2D) snapshots. Current CASSI systems use a set of fixed coded apertures to modulate the spatio-spectral data cube before the compressive measurement. This paper proposes an adaptive projection method to improve the compressive efficiency of the CASSI system by adaptively designing the coded aperture according to a-priori knowledge of the scene. The adaptive coded apertures are constructed from the nonlinear thresholding of the grey-scale map of the scene, which is captured by an aided RGB camera. Then, the 3D encoded spectral scene is projected onto the 2D FPAs. Based on the sparsity assumption, the spectral images can be reconstructed by the compressive sensing algorithm using the FPA measurements. This paper studies and verifies the proposed adaptive coded aperture method on a spatial super-resolution CASSI system, where the resolution of the coded aperture is higher than that of the FPAs. It is shown that the adaptive coded apertures provide superior reconstruction performance of the spectral images over the random coded apertures.