Improving resolution of miniature spectrometers by exploiting sparse nature of signals

Abstract

In this paper, we present a signal processing approach to improve the resolution of a spectrometer with a fixed number of low-cost, non-ideal filters. We aim to show that the resolution can be improved beyond the limit set by the number of filters by exploiting the sparse nature of a signal spectrum. We consider an underdetermined system of linear equations as a model for signal spectrum estimation. We design a non-negative L 1 norm minimization algorithm for solving the system of equations. We demonstrate that the resolution can be improved multiple times by using the proposed algorithm. © 2012 Optical Society of America.