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.