Compact Low-Cost Hyperspectral Imaging via Angular-to-Spectral Diversity Conversion

Snapshot hyperspectral imaging avoids sequential scanning,but systems that jointly achieve stable reconstruction, low cost, andcompact optics remain limited. We present a snapshot hyperspectralimaging system based on angular-to-spectral diversity conversion. A ta-pered kaleidoscope creates replicated views with distinct incidence di-rections, and a directly attached birefringent filter converts them intoview-channel-dependent spectral transmittances, yielding complemen-tary measurements that better condition the inverse problem for morestable single-shot spectral reconstruction. The system preserves a sim-ple pixel-wise linear model for fast non-learning-based reconstruction anduses only off-the-shelf components without relay optics or cascaded mod-ules. We select the birefringent filter configuration using a condition-number-based criterion and validate the system on both synthetic andreal data.