Leuven.Inc Visionary Seminar 'Imaging revolutions through hyperspectral technology'

Organised by Leuven.Inc in cooperation with imec

A hyperspectral camera captures the information contained in all the light reflected from an object, and not only the light visible to the human eye. With that information, it is possible to determine which materials make up an object or to identify contamination in medicines, identify cancerous cells, determine the rate of wound healing, calculate the water needs for a crop and so on.

Today’s setups for hyperspectral analysis are bulky, complex and expensive machines. They are research tools rather than professional or consumer electronics. Although the potential of hyperspectral imaging has been demonstrated for several applications using laboratory setups, its adoption by the industry has so far been limited due to the lack of fast, flexible and cost-effective hyperspectral cameras.

When fast, cheap and compact, hyperspectral cameras can give a boost to many ‘in the field’ applications. If hyperspectral systems are miniaturized down to a microsized device, a whole new class of applications becomes possible. Imagine for example a small pen to check your skin for melanoma. But also food inspection and sorting, printing and colorimetry, security and surveillance, pharmaceutical process control, recycling, oil spill detection and crop health monitoring will benefit from the development of fast, flexible and cost-effective hyperspectral cameras.

Practical aspects

Date: Thursday September 29th, 2011
Location: imec, room -1.A, Kapeldreef 75, 3001 Leuven (Heverlee)

Programme 

The interventions will be held in English 

Participation fee

135 euro (excl. VAT): members of Leuven.Inc - 175 euro (excl. VAT): all others Special fee available for Master and PhD students affiliated and billable to academic institutes.  Please do contact us by e-mail.
	Participation in our activities at -50% discount via KMO-portefeuille Pijler OPLEIDING: Leuven.Inc Approval number DV.O106761 More info: www.kmo-portefeuille.be

Registration

Registrations before Thursday September 21st, 2011, preferably via the online registration form (use the 'Register' button) or by email to admin@leuveninc.com (including all contact and invoice details).

After registration you will receive a confirmation and route description. The registration fee is payable after receipt of invoice. Cancellation after subscription is not possible. However, replacement by a colleague is allowed.*

* As an (Associate) Company Member you can be replaced by a colleague. As an individual Member you can only be replaced by another Individual Member. When this is not possible, Leuven.Inc will charge an extra fee for the replacement by a non-member.

Abstracts 

Hyperspectral Imaging escapes the Lab and saves lives! - Francesco Pessolano, Manager NVision Program at imec
Hyperspectral Imaging provides us with the mean to precisely identify what material occupies what point in space. Avery simple function that is used today in research laboratories for designing dumb systems that look smart. Recent technological advances are, however, helping this technology to escape the Lab and in doing so hyperspectral imaging will start having a great impact in our lives. In this talk, we will illustrate how this technology is escaping the Lab and what are the effect every normal person will experience because of that.

New opportunities for environmental monitoring by means of hyperspectral earth observation from unmanned aerial vehicles and small satellites - Bavo Delauré, project manager at VITO of the MEDUSA project (light weight high resolution multi-spectral earth observation instrument)
Hyperspectral imaging is being used as earth observation technique since many years and exploits the fact that the different land covers reflect and absorb the sunlight in a unique way. Apart from classification it allows in many cases to detect changes in the environment like diseases in fruit orchards, soil pollution, agae bloom in sea water,…. For this reason hyperspectral imaging is a very powerful technique to execute environmental monitoring of the earth.
Traditionally hyperspectral cameras which are used in earth observation are operated from manned aircraft and satellites and tend to be complex and heavy instruments inducing a high operational cost. Furthermore the nature of those traditional platforms limits the possibilities to receive information from a specific region at a high revisit time. This reduces the potential to continuously monitor a site of interest.
The development of new earth observation platforms like unmanned aerial systems and small satellites (mini, micro, nano-sats,…) opens new opportunities to realize high update rates and cheaper data acquisition. The challenge is to develop compact and lightweight cameras which are compatible with those platforms but still reach acceptable performance and suitable algorithms to monitor the state of our environment.

Multispectral and three dimensional imaging for disease diagnosis in minimally invasive surgery - Dan Elson, senior lecturer in the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Institute of Global Health Innovation and Division of Surgery, Imperial College London
We present our research in multispectral imaging applied to minimally invasive surgery, in fluorescence, polarization resolved and diffuse reflection modalities. These different techniques are applied to detecting different tissue disease states, for instance during cancer diagnosis and in detecting tissue oxygenation. The light source is a highly spectrally controllable supercontinuum laser controlled by a digital micromirror device. When acquiring data in vivo, image registration is a challenge for moving tissue, and we present a method to align the images using a stereo endoscope that can also allow integration onto the da Vinci robotic platform. Finally, multispectral imaging may allow the three dimensional quantification of organ shape and structure during minimally-invasive surgery, which could enhance precision by allowing registration of multi-modal or pre-operative image data (US/MRI/CT) and the live optical image to the surgeon.

Compact and high-speed hyperspectral imaging: a practical implementation - Klaas Tack, Research Engineer at imec
Many modern industries make use of computer vision or machine vision to control processes, detect events and model environments. In most cases, these systems are built around digital cameras that are using visible light, are customized to one particular setting and use image processing to e.g. detect objects in the captured images. In addition to these traditional vision systems, more complex systems have been developed that use the electromagnetic spectrum in a different manner, by combining spectroscopy with imaging. These systems have the advantage that spectral information can be extracted from the images and are called multi- or hyperspectral imaging systems. We present a novel optical filter, which can be directly post-processed on top of standard state-of-the-art image sensors, to form an integrated hyperspectral image sensor. This so-called wedge filter enables high speed, low cost and compact hyperspectral cameras for use in many application domains.