Optimization of a Moving Colored Coded Aperture in Compressive Spectral Imaging

Coded aperture compressive spectral imagers allow sensing a three-dimensional (3D) data cube by using two-dimensional (2D) projections of the coded and spectrally dispersed source. The traditional block-unblock coded apertures have been recently replaced by patterned optical filter arrays, allowing to modulate the spatial and spectral information. The real implementation of these patterned or "colored" coded apertures in terms of cost and complexity, directly depends on the number of filters to be used as well as the number of snapshots to be captured. This paper introduces a coded aperture optimization having in consideration these restrictions, the final design obtained is a moving colored coded aperture, which improves the reconstruction quality of the data cube and is physically implementable. Simulations show the accuracy and performance achieved with the proposed approach yielding up to 3 dB gain in PSNR over the current literature designs.