Patent ID: 9395473
Filing Date: 2016-07-19
CPC Classification: A61B,B82Y,G01J,G01N,G02B

Claim Text:
1. A method of characterizing an incident radiation employing filtering, the method comprising: providing a spectrum sensor that includes a plurality of combinations of a filter device and a photodetector optically coupled to the filter device, wherein each filter device has a transmittance spectrum that is different from transmittance spectra of other filter devices, wherein at least one of the filter devices comprises a contiguous conductive layer in which the corresponding array of periodic patterns are embodied as apertures entirely laterally surrounded by the contiguous conductive layer, and wherein at least one of the filter devices comprises two dielectric layers, the contiguous conductive layer is disposed between the two dielectric layers, the continuous conductive layer includes a plurality of apertures and gaps, and the apertures and gaps are filled with a dielectric material that is the same as the two dielectric layers to thereby reduce numbers of dips and peaks in the spectrum and increase transmittance or reflectance; providing an incident radiation to each filter device of the spectrum sensor; detecting, at each photodetector, a transmitted radiation from a respective filter device; generating measured outputs from the photodetector, wherein different transmittance spectra of the filter devices provide different weighting to a spectrum of the incident radiation; and generating an estimation of a spectral profile of the incident radiation from the measured outputs of the photodetector employing an estimation method that utilizes the different weighting corresponding to the filter devices.