Bodkin Design and Engineering, LLC of Wellesley, MA, developed an imager methodology with the ability to rapidly acquire hyperspectral images at a high frame rate, allowing the viewer to identify the chemical composition of imaged targets. This innovative design has commercial applications in the petrochemical industry, medical imaging, food inspection, agricultural imaging, and drug enforcement.

Bodkin’s imager could be used in law-enforcement cameras to help investigators detect evidence of drug labs.

Because the imager is staring, not scanning, the result is consistent across the pixel plane; each image can be offloaded and another “snapshot” taken at a data-cube rate of 30 hertz, without the jitter and overlay problems of competing techniques. This approach translates to fast results without filters or moving parts. Each pixel contains spectral information that can be translated to chemical composition.

The detector operates in visible, short-wave, and midwave infrared (IR) wavelengths. The company has built hyperspectral imagers in the visible, SWIR, MWIR, and LWIR bands, but the current Phase II device is a dual-band system with an SWIR hyperspectral imaging channel and an MWIR video imaging channel, making it suitable for some non-military applications. In areas such as drug interdiction, the imager could be incorporated into a surveillance camera to detect evidence of a crystal meth lab, often a crude shack in a weedy field that reeks with the byproducts of drug synthesis. The gaseous clouds (phosphine, sulfur) associated with such laboratories are frequently dense enough to be detected and identified by an infrared imager. In the petrochemical industry, the imager could be used to detect oil seeping from leaks at a drilling site, as well as in the discovery process itself, by sensing upwelling hydrocarbons that float on the sea surface.