Hyper-spectral imaging has recently gained increasing attention for use in different applications, including agricultural investigation, ground tracking, remote sensing and many other. However, the high cost, large physical size and complicated operation process stop hyperspectral cameras from being employed for various applications and research fields. In this paper, we introduce a cost-efficient, compact and easy to use active illumination camera that may benefit many applications. We developed a fully functional prototype of such camera. With the hope of helping with agricultural research, we tested our camera for plant root imaging. In addition, a U-Net model for spectral reconstruction was trained by using a reference hyperspectral camera's data as ground truth and our camera's data as input. We demonstrated our camera's ability to obtain additional information over a typical RGB camera. In addition, the ability to reconstruct hyperspectral data from multi-spectral input makes our device compatible to models and algorithms developed for hyperspectral applications with no modifications required.

翻译：高光谱成像技术近年来在农业调查、地面追踪、遥感等诸多应用领域日益受到关注。然而，高光谱相机的高成本、大体积及复杂操作流程限制了其在各应用场景与研究领域的普及。本文提出一种成本效益高、结构紧凑且易于使用的主动照明相机，有望推动多领域应用发展。我们研制了该相机的全功能原型机，并以辅助农业研究为目标，开展了植物根系成像测试。此外，我们以参考高光谱相机的数据作为真实值，以本相机数据作为输入，训练了用于光谱重建的U-Net模型。实验证明本相机相较于传统RGB相机具备获取额外信息的能力。同时，通过从多光谱输入重建高光谱数据的功能，本设备可直接兼容现有高光谱应用模型与算法而无需任何修改。