Optical determination of material abundances in mixtures

So-called spectral unmixing describes the mathematical process of extracting the material abundances in mixtures from acquired hyperspectral images. The acquisition and actual processing of such images, however, requires significant hardware effort and calculation time. The presented approach shifts the calculation into sophisticatedly customized spectral filters, bypassing the need for acquiring and processing the hyperspectral images. The desired material abundances are directly obtained by acquiring two-dimensional images encoding the abundances.