October 17, 2025
BTC Delivers Ground-Breaking, Commercialization-Ready Polarization Hyperspectral Imager
Sparks, MD--Brimrose Technology Corporation (BTC) has fully developed and readied for the commercial market a Polarization HyperSpectral Imager (PHSI), which combines a spectropolarimeter with a hyperspectral imager into one instrument. The imager has been handed over to the Brimrose Corporation of America for commercial sale.
The PHSI was developed through the R&D efforts of BTC, which greatly benefited from two Small Business Technology Transfer (STTRs) programs, the first with NASA and the second with the U.S. Department of the Army, according to Dr. Sudhir Trivedi, Brimrose’s Director of Research and Development. It was the ability of these two agencies to work together, as well as the hard work of BTC’s leading scientists, that led to the success of this new instrument.
The initial work was carried out as part of an STTR Phase I and Phase II award (Contract #NNX15CL29C) from NASA Langley Research Center (POC/Technical Monitor: Dr. Narsimha Prasad). NASA applications include detection of life signs, determination of geological, mineralogical and chemical compositions of planetary surfaces and sub-surfaces, and the exploration of the ocean and exoplanets.
US Army DEVCOM got interested in this development with NASA and wanted to use this concept and optimization of polarizing a Hyperspectral Imaging (PHSI) instrument for defense applications. The Army awarded an enhanced Phase II STTR to carry out this work (Contract # W911SR-17-C-0045, Technical Monitors: James O. Jensen/Janet Jensen). The Army in general was interested in PHSI for wide area standoff detection of chemical and possibly biological agents. It also is seen as potentially playing a role in identifying person-borne IEDs.
The instrument was developed into a lightweight, handheld imager that contains no moving parts, and provides both hyperspectral imaging and spectropolarimeter imaging capabilities. This dual use is important. The combination of polarimetry and hyperspectral imaging provides significantly more strategic information, which is missed while using only a hyperspectral imager.
In fact, the new PHSI offers a significantly larger number of bands that can be used in image post-processing analyses to provide more accurate information than either one of the instruments on its own. PHSI allows for the measurement of all six polarization states needed for Stokes vector measurements on each pixel.
For more general information about PHSI, contact David Chaffee; for more technical information, contact Dr. Sudhir Trivedi or Dr. Feng Jin. They can be reached at 410-472-7070.