Patent ID: 7835002

Claim:
An arrangement for the production of instantaneous or non-instantaneous multi-band images, comprising: light collecting means, an image sensor with at least one two dimensional sensor array with an instantaneous colour separating means, positioned before or embedded in said two dimensional sensor array in the optical path of said arrangement, and a first uniform spectral filter in said optical path, with the purpose of restricting imaging to certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, characterised in that a filter unit is used comprising overlapping colour or spectral filter mosaics, or a filter unit comprising overlapping colour or spectral filter mosaics and uniform colour or spectral filters, that said filter unit is either permanently or interchangeably positioned before said colour separating means in said optical path in, or close to, converged light, that said colour or spectral filter mosaics comprises a multitude of homogeneous filtering regions, where there is an overlap or partial overlap between transmission curves of said filtering regions of colour or spectral filter mosaics, said uniform colour or spectral filters and the filtering regions of said colour separating means, that said transmission curves of said colour or spectral filter mosaics, said uniform filters and said colour separating means are spread out in the intervals of a spectrum to be studied, and that the combination of said colour separating means and said colour or spectral filter mosaics produces different sets of linearly independent transmission curves, and that the multiple-filter image captured by said image sensor is demosaicked, by identifying and segmenting the image regions that are affected by the regions of the multiple filter mosaic, to obtain a multi-band image, and that said multi-band image is transformed by using one of the two approaches, the statistical approach using a partial least squares method or an artificial neural network approach, to obtain a multi- or hyperspectral image.