Spectral imaging by synchronizing capture and illumination.

This paper proposes a spectral imaging technology by synchronizing a programmable light source and a high-speed monochrome camera. The light source is capable of emitting arbitrary spectrum in high speed, so that the system has the advantage of capturing spectral images without using filters. The camera and the light source are controlled by a computer in order to capture image sequence synchronously with camera and illuminant control signals. First, we describe a projector for spectrally rendering a real scene as a fundamental usage of the spectral imaging system. Second, we describe the effective applications to (1) spectral reflectance recovery and (2) tristimulus imager. The performances of the proposed algorithms to solve the applied problems are examined in experiments in detail. We demonstrate potential applicability of the proposed spectral imaging technology.