The market for hyperspectral cameras designed around CMOS chips continues to grow in terms of deployment and availability. Such cameras are now available at competitive price points that make them suitable for a wide range of applications, including medical instrumentation, industrial inspection, art/history preservation, and precision agriculture. The three main application requirements driving demand in the commercial market for hyperspectral imaging include form factor, broad-spectrum capabilities, and image acquisition at video-rate or faster speeds. Form factor refers to compact, lightweight, and mobile cameras that are less cumbersome and, consequently, more valuable for research and other work in the field. Broad-spectrum capability means the characteristic spectrum covered by the camera encompasses more than one sub-wavelength range—for example, ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared (SWIR)—while fast acquisition translates to making images quickly available for analysis.
In this issue, we highlight three widely different recent use cases of hyperspectral imaging: analyzing Da Vinci’s Last Supper, pythons, and precision agriculture. For all these cases, Imec designed portable and robust cameras that can be deployed on location, while at the same time putting to the test new SWIR sensors (see article). We also highlight a young, up-and-coming hyperspectral imaging expert in a new series called Faces in Photonics (see article). The purpose of this new article format is to profile experts reshaping photonics technology. With so many live events going virtual these days, one particular facet that we will focus on with this new format is the ability to hear from industry experts face-to-face and get to know one another beyond the ordinary exchange of phone calls and e-mails.
In addition to hyperspectral imaging, we also cover white-light interferometry and sensor fusion (see article), picosecond and femtosecond fiber lasers (see article), beam modeling and the nonparaxial Gaussian beam (see article), confocal filtering that enables submicron particle detection (see article), and frequency-domain terahertz spectroscopy (see article). As always, I hope you enjoy this issue.
