Longwave infrared compressive hyperspectral imager

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) is developing a longwave infrared (LWIR) compressive sensing hyperspectral imager (CS HSI) based on a single pixel architecture for standoff vapor phase plume detection. The sensor employs novel use of a high throughput stationary interferometer and a digital micromirror device (DMD) converted for LWIR operation in place of the traditional cooled LWIR focal plane array. The CS HSI represents a substantial cost reduction over the state of the art in LWIR HSI instruments. Radiometric improvements for using the DMD in the LWIR spectral range have been identified and implemented. In addition, CS measurement and sparsity bases specifically tailored to the CS HSI instrument and chemical plume imaging have been developed and validated using LWIR hyperspectral image streams of chemical plumes. These bases enable comparable statistics to detection based on uncompressed data. In this paper, we present a system model predicting the overall performance of the CS HSI system. Results from a breadboard build and test validating the system model are reported. In addition, the measurement and sparsity basis work demonstrating the plume detection on compressed hyperspectral images is presented.