Acousto-optical imaging spectrometer for unmanned aerial vehicles

The airborne hyperspectral (HS) systems for geomonitoring from board of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) use special modes of collection, transmission and processing of HS information. We suggest that autonomous mode can be realized on the base of real-time on-board information processing by means of spectral imaging. We demonstrate that such systems based on aberration-compensated pair of acousto-optical tunable filters (AOTF) satisfy most of the requirements for UAV HS system. The operation principle, characteristic features and prospects of the developed HS imaging system are described.