Imaging Spectrometer for Defeating Camouflage

Camouflage is a key part of battlefield tactics to visually disguise personal and military assets. Basic camouflage is designed to confuse the human observer across the visible spectrum, with more intelligent versions designed to operate across multiple wavelength bands, such as obscuring the heat signature of an engine.
The team will design an imaging spectrometer that will be used to spectrally discriminate between a camouflaged object and the background the camouflage is designed to simulate. An imaging spectrometer captures data-rich images containing not only spatial information but spectral as well, containing the wavelengths captured in each pixel. The team will write software to both control the imaging spectrometer, and also process the data in order to perform object discrimination. Careful optomechanical design will be necessary to align the system and keep it stable such that the calibration of the system does not drift significantly over time.