UV raman imaging for hazardous substance detection applications

Rapid and reliable detection of small amounts of hazardous substances remains highly desirable within defense and protective contexts. Raman scattering is one of the non-contact optical spectroscopic techniques that already has proven useful for different detection purposes and a large number of instruments exists on the market today. However, added performance may be gained by shifting the laser wavelength from the visible or near-infrared, generally used in currently available Raman instruments, to the UV band. This report covers different methods of acquiring UV Raman hyperspectral cubes using a tunable laser source and an imaging spectrometer as main components. Results obtained by setups resulting in coarse spectral resolution via fixed interference filters to relatively high spectral resolution UV Raman images when using random, binary transmission masks as coded apertures in a Compressed Sensing approach are shown and discussed.