Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging with a DOE

A few scene points, six sample wavelengths each — watch where they land on the sensor.

A diffractive optical element (DOE) is a microstructured optic that bends light by a wavelength-dependent angle — the same principle as a diffraction grating, engineered into the imaging path.

An ordinary lens focuses every color from a scene point to (almost) the same sensor pixel: you record brightness, not spectrum. Capturing a full spectral cube normally takes many exposures through different filters.

With a DOE, each wavelength lands at a slightly different sensor position. A single 2D exposure ends up holding an overlapping, coded mixture of every scene point's spectrum.

Because the DOE's dispersion pattern is known precisely, a computational reconstruction algorithm can invert that mixing — recovering the full (x, y, λ) datacube from one snapshot.