SURPRISE laboratory demonstrator: outcomes of the laboratory test campaign

A laboratory demonstrator of a super-resolved, Compressive-Sensing (CS)-based instrument was designed, assembled and tested in the framework of the H2020 SURPRISE project (SUper-Resolved comPRessive InStrument in the visible and medium infrared for Earth observation applications). The instrument is a multispectral imager working in the VIS-NIR and the MIR spectral ranges for Earth Observation (EO) applications. The imager relies on the concept of the single pixel camera: the target image is acquired by using a sequence of coded measurements implemented by means of a Digital Mirror Device (DMD) and a single-pixel detector. The image is reconstructed at the same spatial sampling of the coding mask thanks to the use of the CS paradigm that optimizes the reconstruction using only a limited number of measurements. The demonstrator foresees the use of a scanning system to perform the acquisition of the entire scene. It acquires a multispectral image with ten spectral channels in the VIS-NIR and two channels in the MIR. The super-resolution factor can be adjusted from 4 x 4 to 32 x 32. The DMD used in the demonstrator was a DLP(R)7000, manufactured by Texas Instruments Inc. and reworked in order to replace the glass window to gain transparency in the MIR bands. The target image reconstruction is obtained by using ad-hoc CS reconstruction algorithms. The results obtained using the SURPRISE demonstrator showed good potential for novel EO instruments with enhanced capabilities in terms of target spatial sampling and native compression.