Miniaturized Hyperspectral Imager Utilizing a Reconfigurable Filter Array for Both High Spatial and Spectral Resolutions

Miniaturized hyperspectral imaging based on filter arrays has attracted much attention in consumer applications, such as food safety and biomedical applications. In this Letter, we demonstrate a miniaturized hyperspectral imager using a reconfigurable filter array to tackle the existing trade-off issue between the spectral and spatial resolutions. Utilizing tens of intermediate states of a vanadium dioxide cavity, we increase the total number of physical spectral channels by tens of times from a 2 × 2 mosaic filter unit, providing both high spatial and spectral resolutions for spectral imaging. The reconfigurable filter has a good spectral resolvability of 10 nm in the visible range with a wavelength inaccuracy of less than 2.1 nm. Hyperspectral imaging is demonstrated with a frame rate of 4.5 Hz.