Acousto-optic supermultispectral imaging

An assumption of supermultispectral imaging is presented. The focal point is to encode an object between spatial and spectral information with a tunable bandpass filter, which is called the spatial-spectral encoder. Theoretical and experimental results have verified that the assumption is correct. A supermultispectral imaging system that uses an acousto-optic tunable filter as the encoder was based on the assumption. Approximately 5 nm of spectral resolution with 10° × 10° of the two-dimensional instant field of view was obtained in the visible range. The most fascinating features may be that the spectral resolution is insensitive to the field of view and effective optical aperture and that the system has no mechanical moving parts.