Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operated megapixel spectral camera

Abstract

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a lightweight Fabry-Perot interferometer based hyperspectral imager weighting only 400 g which makes it compatible with various small UAV platforms. The concept of the hyperspectral imager has been published in SPIE Proc. 74741 and 76682. This UAV spectral imager is capable of recording 5 Mpix multispectral data in the wavelength range of 500 - 900 nm at resolutions of 10-40 nm, Full-Width-Half-Maximum (FWHM). An internal memory buffer allows 16 Mpix of image data to be stored during one image burst. The user can configure the system to take either three 5 Mpix images or up to 54 VGA resolution images with each triggering. Each image contains data from one, two or three wavelength bands which can be separated during post processing. This allows a maximum of 9 spectral bands to be stored in high spatial resolution mode or up to 162 spectral bands in VGA-mode during each image burst. Image data is stored in a compact flash memory card which provides the mass storage for the imager. The field of view of the system is 26° × 36° and the ground pixel size at 150 m flying altitude is around 40 mm in high-resolution mode. The design, calibration and test flight results will be presented.