Development of an acousto-optic system for hyperspectral image segmentation

Image segmentation is a typical operation in many image analysis and computer vision applications. However, hyperspectral image segmentation is a field which have not been fully investigated. In this study an analogue-digital image segmentation technique is presented. The system uses an acousto-optic tuneable filter, and a CCD camera to capture hyperspectral images that are stored in a digital grey scale format. The dataset was built considering several objects with remarkable differences in the reflectance and brightness components. In addition, the work presents a semi-supervised segmentation technique to deal with the complex problem of hyperspectral image segmentation, with its corresponding quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Particularly, the developed acousto-optic system is capable to acquire 120 frames through the whole visible light spectrum. Moreover, the analysis of the spectral images of a given object enables its segmentation using a simple subtraction operation. Experimental results showed that it is possible to segment any region of interest with a good performance rate by using the proposed analogue-digital segmentation technique.