Multispectral imaging involves capturing the same scene at different wavelengths using various narrowband filters stacked or integrated into digital camera sensors. This technology makes it possible to extract the additional information that a human eye or conventional camera fails to capture and thus has important applications in object identification, precision agriculture, and medicine. Multispectral imaging in visible wavelengths is readily possible due to the availability of digital imaging sensors and existing narrowband filter designs like metal-dielectric-metal films, dielectric films, or Fabry-Perot cavities [1-2]. Multispectral imaging in thermal longwave infrared (LWIR) wavelengths of 8-14 μm range has more advanced applications as they can see through fire, detect various gases, and investigate materials non-destructively through thermal signatures. However, conventional thermal image sensors can image in a single spectral band only. Thermal multispectral imaging is hindered by traditional filter technology where many layers of different materials are required for obtaining various spectral bands and limited wavelength tunability. On-chip integration of the infrared filters on the thermal image sensors to build a compact multispectral thermal camera is still an emerging area [3-5]. In the current work, we design and demonstrate a low-cost single sensor-based multispectral thermal sensor system composed of copper-based plasmonic imaging filter mosaic (multiple spectral filters are fabricated on a single substrate using only one lithography step and two deposition steps) integrated into an uncooled monochrome thermal sensor. The proposed work is mass-fabricable, scalable, and integrable, thereby leveraging next-generation LWIR thermal snapshot multi- and hyperspectral imaging.
Spectral imaging allows data acquisition at any particular frequency range in the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum to extract additional information. The light energy emitted from the sources or reflected by the objects is selectively sensed in specific bands of the EM spectrum to produce images. Multispectral imaging in long-wave infrared (thermal wavelengths) is an emerging research area due to its ability to identify objects precisely from the emission spectrum for chemical detection, gas sensing, night vision, and surveillance applications.1 The multispectral imaging in the long-wave infrared is limited by the conventional filter technologies and limited materials responding in the thermal wavelengths. Wavelength filters based on surface plasmon resonance can overcome such limitations and can produce filters using a single nanoscale thick metal film with wide wavelength tunability. This paper presents a wavelength filter technology operating in six bands of the thermal region (7 – 14 μm). With copper (Cu) as the metal layer and germanium (Ge) as the cap layer, the transmission efficiency of lithographically patterned multilayer plasmonic filters on gallium arsenide (GaAs) substrate has improved up to 60% in thermal wavelengths. Thus, a thermal multispectral filter system is realized to acquire narrow transmission bands in the thermal region using surface infrared plasmonics of Cu in a dielectric-metal-dielectric (DMD) mosaic of GaAs-Cu-Ge. The filters are then integrated on thermal image sensors mounted on an in-house processing electronic platform to develop a six-band multispectral thermal sensor system. The working of the snapshot thermal multispectral sensor system is demonstrated by capturing the images at six different bands. The developed multispectral system can be adopted for non-destructive thermal imaging or can be used directly as a microspectrometer for various thermal spectroscopy applications
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