Smartphone Cameras Go Hyperspectral

This is really cool and very clever. But i want to raise one thing.

> designed a special color reference chart that can be printed on a card

My rudimentary understanding of physics makes me suspect this sentence is a simplification.

A normal printer use Cyan Magenta Yellow Black to print. A photo of such a print would already destroy alot of spectral information for the same reason the individual rgb sensors do.

So i suspect those colored dots are a very careful and deliberate concoction of very particular inks with very specific spectral color bands.

I suspect alot of effort went into finding, mixing and algoritmically combining the right inks.

I'm guessing it works similarly to a how a narrow band florescent lamp makes only materials that reflect a very specific frequency be visible, which makea alot of prints and pigments look wierd. (If you do the opposite; use ink with very specific spectral band, you can instead measure the lamp)

Insanely clever. (Whatever they did)

> The new patent-pending technique

> “Every photo carries hidden spectral information waiting to be uncovered. By extracting it, we can turn everyday photography into science.”

And with our patent, extract rent from anyone who wants to do it!

Patent-pending... again someone trying to rent-seek a high-school physics fair idea. Measuring light absorption with a camera is almost as old as the camera.

Using a known reflectance chart in-scene to recover spectral information is a standard calibration technique.

What "investment" is patent law protecting here?

This doesn't really seem like "hyperspectral imaging". I think the idea is having a reference colour chart of known emission characteristics and photographing it through a transparent substance gives you an idea of how much that substance attenuates each wavelength.

It's a cool trick if it works, but it seems very finicky and I guess would be limited to transparent/homogeneous liquids?

This could improve chromatic adaptation of captured images. In other words, better results when changing the white point.

I don't understand how from 3 independent values per pixel (RGB) they claim to derive 200+ independent values per pixel. Unless they are assuming a smooth "image" (all pixels the same RGB), perturbed only by the color card? Not exactly a camera then

I was hoping that someone came out with a camera that not only had not only sensors for visible light, but for infrared and UV. It's just another color to add to the sensors; I think we have enough megapixels, seems like going for other bands is reasonable.