Abstract
There is much interest in imaging of desert soils to understand their mineral composition, grain sizes and orientations for various civilian and military applications. We discuss the development of two novel field-portable spectropolarimetric imagers based on acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) technology in the visible near-infrared (VNTR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) wavelength regions. The first imager covers a spectral region from 450 to 800 nm with a bandwidth of 5 nm at 633 nm and the second from 1000 to 1600 nm with a bandwidth of 15 nm at 1350 nm. These imagers will be used in field tests. In this paper, we discuss salient aspect of spectropolarimetric imager development and present some data collected with them.