Low-Cost Optical architecture Based on RGB and Single Pixel Measurements Aiming to UAV Applications

Abstract

Spectral imaging has a wide range of applications, like remote sensing or biomedical imaging. In recent years, with the increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is common to attach a spectral camera to an UAV to acquire information. Unfortunately, the spectral cameras used with UAV are expensive, and in most of the cases, it has a low spectral resolution. Therefore this work proposes a low-cost optical architecture to acquire spectral images. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the UAV movement during the flight to acquire the spectral image. The proposed optical architecture is composed of two arms, an RGB camera, and a modified single-pixel camera. The results show that, depending on the sensing conditions selected, it is possible to retrieve high-quality spectral images. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture improves image quality compared with an RGB camera and the single-pixel camera (SPC) separately, in up to 4.05dB and 17.09dB, respectively, and obtain the same performance of an architecture that combine the SPC and RGB in a reconstruction of a spectral image of 6 spectral bands, achieving a PSNR of 36.5dB. Moreover, the optical architecture proposed has the advantage of the reduced amount of information in comparison to SPC and SPC + RGB, also, the implementation costs are reduced drastically because the proposed architecture does not use a digital micromirror device (DMD) to codify the incoming scene.