Three imaging systems have been nominated for the Prism Awards 2014. Bayspec, Stanford Computer Optics and Tornado Spectral Systems have been nominated for the OCI-1000 handheld hyperspectral imager, the XXRapidFrame framing camera, and the Octane-860 spectrometer, respectively. The award will be presented at Photonics West, which takes place in San Francisco from 1-6 February.
BaySpec has developed its OCI-1000 handheld hyperspectral imager, a highly-integrated spectral imager that provides a detailed view of the spectrum for every point in an image. By integrating this capability on an image sensor, at the level of the chip itself, the company has removed the need for expensive, bulky and complex optics. The result is a fast spectral imager with on-board computer and display that is battery operated weighing only 0.5lbs. It can be installed on miniature UAV drones or conveyor belts in production lines and eventually, small handhelds could be adapted for use in outpatient medical clinics to check patients’ skin for melanoma or other illnesses.
The high speed multi-channel framing camera, XXRapidFrame from Stanford Computer Optics, consists of a single optical input, an image splitter unit and up to eight individually controllable intensified CCD channels. The multi-channel framing camera is able to record up to eight images with an interframing delay down to 10ps. This enables successive image sequences taken with a corresponding frame rate of up to 100 billion frames per second.
Tornado Spectral Systems’ Octane-860 spectrometer has no moving parts and therefore the company claim it never requires alignment. It offers insensitivity to thermal and vibrational conditions and possesses a flexible centre wavelength and spectral range. The Octane contains a polarisation beam splitter (PBS) connected to two dispersive elements on a planar lightwave circuit (PLC) chip. The first 1,024 pixels of the linear array (LA) read out the TE polarisation, and the second 1,024 read out the orthogonal TM polarisation. With its low cost and small form size, it is the first nanophotonic spectrometer system for Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) designed for OEMs.
The award, presented by SPIE, will honour companies from across the photonics industry as judged by 26 experts from the field.
