Multi-spectral camera enhances both man and machine

Developed at Bavaria’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the device uses off-the-shelf hardware combined with novel algorithms to provide spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions. It is the addition of the last of these – the spectral wavelength of colours – that promises both to enhance human perception as well as improve the performance of cameras used in autonomous vehicles, drones and imaging systems. The work appears in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

“Research up to now has mainly focused on increasing spatial and temporal resolution, which means the number of megapixels or images per second,” explained Dr Jürgen Seiler, an electrical engineer at the Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing at FAU.

“Spectral resolution - the wavelength and thus the perception of colours - has largely been adjusted to match human sight during the development of cameras, which merely corresponds to measuring the colours red, green, and blue. However, much more information is hidden in the light spectrum that can be used for a wide range of tasks. For example, we know that some animals use additional light spectra for hunting and searching for food.”