Ultra-wide-field-of-view high-resolution cascaded spectral imaging system

Spectral imaging combines the advantages of spectroscopy as an analytical tool with the two-dimensional object visualization obtained by optical imaging. At present, spectral imaging systems suffer from severe scale-dependent geometric aberrations. This prevents the simultaneous realization of a wide field of view (FOV) and high resolution. Here we propose an ultra-wide-FOV high-resolution cascaded spectral imaging system (URIS), which captures an ultra-wide-FOV panchromatic image with a folding monocentric lens and obtains high-resolution spectral images after local aberration correction by the spectral imaging sub-channels. The key issue of how the position of the aperture stop affects the illumination uniformity of the sub-channels has been studied, contributing to achieving the spectral images stitching between adjacent sub-channels and improving the performance of the processed spectral image. The URIS is optimally designed with 19 spectral imaging sub-channels to cover a full FOV of about 110°. It achieves an excellent spatial resolution of 0.075 mrad and a high spectral resolution of 4 nm theoretically. An experiment is also demonstrated to verify the wide FOV and the uniformity of sub-channels of URIS, confirming the correctness of the theoretical study. URIS has great advantages in spectral imaging of large macroscopic scenes, inspiring various machine vision applications.