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.
Keywords: array filter chip; hyperspectral imaging; reconfigurable filter; vanadium oxide.