The Future of Hyperspectral Imaging

This book includes some very recent applications and the newest emerging trends of hyper-spectral imaging (HSI). HSI is a very recent and strange beast, a sort of a melting pot of previous techniques and scientific interests, merging and concentrating the efforts of physicists, chemists, botanists, biologists, and physicians, to mention just a few, as well as experts in data crunching and statistical elaboration. For almost a century, scientific observation, from looking to planets and stars down to our own cells and below, could be divided into two main categories: analyzing objects on the basis of their physical dimension (recording size, position, weight, etc. and their variations) or on how the object emits, reflects, or absorbs part of the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e., spectroscopy. While the two aspects have been obviously entangled, instruments and skills have always been clearly distinct from each other. With HSI now available, this is no longer the case. This instrument can return specimen dimensionalities and spectroscopic properties to any single pixel of your specimen, in a single set of data. HSI modality is ubiquitous and scale-invariant enough to be used to mark terrestrial resources on the basis of a land map obtained from satellite observation (actually, the oldest application of this type) or to understand if the cell you are looking at is cancerous or perfectly healthy. For all these reasons, HSI represents one of the most exciting methodologies of the new millennium.