Trends in Snapshot Spectral Imaging: Systems, Processing, and Quality

Recent advances in spectral imaging have enabled snapshot acquisition, as a means to mitigate the impracticalities of spectral imaging, e.g., expert operators and cumbersome hardware. Snapshot spectral imaging, e.g., in technologies like spectral filter arrays, has also enabled higher temporal resolution at the expense of the spatio-spectral resolution, allowing for the observation of temporal events. Designing, realising, and deploying such technologies is yet challenging, particularly due to the lack of clear, user-meaningful quality criteria across diverse applications, sensor types, and workflows. Key research gaps include optimising raw image processing from snapshot spectral imagers and assessing spectral image and video quality in ways valuable to end-users, manufacturers, and developers. This paper identifies several challenges and current opportunities. It proposes considering them jointly and suggests creating a new unified snapshot spectral imaging paradigm that would combine new systems and standards, new algorithms, new cost functions, and quality indices.