Multi-spectral compressive snapshot imaging using RGB image sensors

Compressive sensing is a powerful sensing and reconstruction framework for recovering high dimensional signals with only a handful of observations and for spectral imaging, compressive sensing offers a novel method of multispectral imaging. Specifically, the coded aperture snapshot spectral imager (CASSI) system has been demonstrated to produce multi-spectral data cubes color images from a single snapshot taken by a monochrome image sensor. In this paper, we expand the theoretical framework of CASSI to include the spectral sensitivity of the image sensor pixels to account for color and then investigate the impact on image quality using either a traditional color image sensor that spatially multiplexes red, green, and blue light filters or a novel Foveon image sensor which stacks red, green, and blue pixels on top of one another. (C)2015 Optical Society of America