The Future of Hyperspectral Imaging

Dear Colleagues,

Hyperspectral-based techniques (HSI) are pervading many, and increasing, fields of application. HSI began as a quite obvious tool within remote airborne observations; for instance, to determine land resources. The rapid development of spectroscopic hardware allowed fundamental passage of HSI from multispectral analyses (a few spectral lines), up to the full control and capture of spectral continuous ranges, while expanding its realm to food, biology, medicine, forensics, and art observation, just to name a few. The remarkable mix of the information (often represented as “hypercubes”) is at the same time spectroscopic (wavelength axis), structural (three axes), and plus time (a further axis). The structural part represents a range of information that can be within at least six orders of magnitude between micrometers (using HSI methods within microscopes, also of confocal type) and meters, while the usually-available large spectral range can be further functionally increased by adding fluorescence and Raman spectroscopies.

However, the rapid increase in the application areas will require a much higher speed in acquisition, clever data elaboration (e.g., neural networking methods are already used to safely assign local spectroscopic fingerprints to HIS images ), new hardware, and new ideas. There is a need to have effective tools, for instance, to make food analyses on real stocks, in real time and compatible with the daily products’ market, or make diagnoses on cells to reveal cancer during a routine medical check, without the need for a long wait.

Which advancements will be eventually more productive and innovative in this field?

We request contributions presenting techniques (methods, tools, ideas, or even market evaluations) that will contribute to the future roadmap of HSI, as well as concepts for significantly innovative objectives in HSI techniques.  Scientifically founded innovative and speculative research lines are welcome for proposal and evaluation.

Dr. Stefano Selci
Guest Editor

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