Design of a Tunable Snapshot Multispectral Imaging System through Ray Tracing Simulation

Research on snapshot multispectral imaging has been popular in the remote sensing community due to the high demands of video-rate remote sensing system for various applications. Existing snapshot multispectral imaging techniques are mainly of a fixed wavelength type, which limits their practical usefulness. This paper describes a tunable multispectral snapshot system by using a dual prism assembly as the dispersion element of the coded aperture snapshot spectral imagers (CASSI). Spectral tuning is achieved by adjusting the air gap displacement of the dual prism assembly. Typical spectral shifts of about 1 nm at 400 nm and 12 nm at 700 nm wavelength have been achieved in the present design when the air-gap of the dual prism is changed from 4.24 mm to 5.04 mm. The paper outlines the optical designs, the performance, and the pros and cons of the dual-prism CASSI (DP-CASSI) system. The performance of the system is illustrated by TracePro(TM) ray tracing, to allow researchers in the field to repeat or to validate the results presented in this paper.