Compressive Spectroscopic Long-Wave Infrared Imaging

Imaging Fourier transform spectroscopy (IFTS) is an established tool for spectroscopic applications due to its high-throughput, inherently broadband and high-resolution detection capability. However, applications in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) require complex cooled detection systems, increasing the cost and the scale of instrumentation. Uncooled microbolometer cameras offer a cheap and compact alternative, but at the expense of detectivity and response time. Therefore, such cameras can be implemented only in the step-scan IFTS [1] . This approach offers the unique ability to employ compressive sampling techniques to reduce acquisition rate to below the Nyquist frequency, f Nyq . In this work we combine step-scan IFTS with compressive sampling techniques to rapidly obtain hyperspectral images of plastics and art samples in the LWIR band.