Full name: Doron Pasha Supervisors: Prof. Ibrahim Abdulhalim and Dr. Isaac August Degree: Ph.D. in Electro-optics Engineering Seminar title: Fast Spectroscopic Imaging using Improved Liquid-Crystal Devices and Algorithms

Fast Spectroscopic Imaging using Improved Liquid-Crystal Devices and Algorithms Doron Pasha Supervision: Prof. Ibrahim Abdulhalim and Dr. Issac August Spectral imaging systems are powerful diagnostic tools that capture spectroscopic signatures across multiple wavelength bands, enabling insight into the physical and chemical properties of objects within a scene. These capabilities have made spectral imaging indispensable in a wide range of applications, including remote sensing, food quality assessment, security, and medical diagnostics. In recent years, advances in deep learning and artificial intelligence have reshaped this field, giving rise to computational spectral imaging, an approach that replaces bulky, slow hardware with a combination of optical encoding and algorithmic reconstruction. Unlike traditional spectrometers, these systems rely on carefully designed optical modulation followed by digital decoding, where the balance between these two stages is a key determinant of performance. In this thesis, I explore liquid crystal (LC) materials and device configurations as fast, compact spectral modulators for computational spectral imaging. By leveraging the distinct optical and physical properties of different LC technologies, I demonstrate multiple high-performance system architectures, each offering unique trade-offs in spectral resolution, speed, and flexibility, and each tailored to different imaging tasks. Complementing the optical design, I develop a novel deep learning–based spectral reconstruction framework that achieves high accuracy and relatively strong generalization while requiring significantly less training data than conventional approaches. Together, these results highlight the potential of liquid crystal-based spectral encoder and learning-based decoder to enable accurate, efficient, and compact next-generation spectral imaging systems.