Capturing a wealth of data in an instant with a new hyperspectral camera

In a normal camera, a lens focuses incoming light onto a sensor chip and converts the data into an image. In TuLIPSS, the lens focuses that light onto a middleman: the bundle of optical fibers.

In the current prototype, these fibers collect more than 30,000 spatial samples and 61 spectral channels in the 450-to-750 nanometer range – essentially, hundreds of thousands of data points – split by prisms into their component bands and passed on to a detector. The detector then feeds these data points to software that recombines them into the desired images or spectra.

The fiber array is tightly packed at the input and rearranged into individually addressable rows at the output, with gaps between them to avoid overlap. Spacing the rows allows researchers to tune spatial and spectral sampling for specific applications, Tkaczyk said.

First author Ye Wang, who earned her doctorate this year at Rice, and her colleagues painstakingly built the prototype, assembling and positioning the fiber bundles by hand. They used scenes in and around Rice to test it, reconstructing images of buildings to fine-tune TuLIPSS and taking spectral images of campus trees to “detect” their species. They also successfully analyzed the health of various plants with spectral data alone.

Continuous capture images of moving traffic in Houston showed the system’s ability to see which spectra are shifting over time (such as moving vehicles and changing traffic lights) and which are stable (everything else). The experiment was a useful proof-of-concept to show how well the spectrometer could filter motion blur in dynamic situations.

Co-author David Alexander, a professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Rice Space Institute, said the researchers have begun discussions with the city of Houston and Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research about testing TuLIPSS in aerial studies of the city.

“Since we need to test TuLIPSS anyway, we want to do something useful,” he said, suggesting a hyperspectral map of the city could reveal how the urban landscape is changing, distinguish buildings from parks or map sources of pollen. “In principle, regular flights over the city will allow us to map out the changing conditions and identify areas that need attention.”

Tkaczyk suggested future versions of TuLIPSS will be useful for agricultural and atmospheric analysis, algae blooms and other environmental conditions where quick data acquisition will be valuable.

“The real challenge has been to decide what to focus on first,” Alexander said. “Ultimately, we want to be successful enough that the next phase of development pushes us closer to flying TuLIPSS in space.”

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