End-to-end optimization of a diffractive spectral imaging system with coded aperture

Coded Aperture Snapshot Spectral Imaging (CASSI) is an effective tool to capture spectral images, which has the advantages of snapshot imaging, high luminous flux, high signal-to-noise ratio and low sampling frequency. However, conventional CASSI generally uses refractive prisms or gratings for spectral dispersion, which leads to the nonlinear dispersion phenomenon and the requirement of large detector chip respectively. To overcome these issues, conventional refractive prisms or gratings are replaced by an axially dispersive diffractive optical element (DOE, i.e., computational optics) together with a RGB Bayer filter (i.e., a color-coded aperture) in this study. Specifically, the spatial-spectral information of a test scene is jointly modulated by the DOE and the Bayer filter integrated with a sensor chip. A fully differentiable imaging model is built based on the principle of diffractive optics and the deep learning technology. Furthermore, an optimization design of the DOE with the coded aperture is realized through an end-to-end approach, the output spectral images of which are restored by a Res-Unet neural network. Several simulation results show that up to 31 high-fidelity spectral bands in the range of 400 to 700 nm with a good spatial and spectral resolution can be recovered by the proposed snapshot system.