A miniature, computerized component, variable interference imaging spectrometer (C2VIFIS) system for airborne remote sensing data acquisition with a two dimensional field of view. An alternating staring/scanning method is used to optimize a pushbroom hyperspectral image data set with a photogrammetric reference. Synchronized CCD-imager sensor modules or cameras are aligned to a common field of view. One imager module has a visible range variable interference filter on its surface, a second imager module has a near-infrared range variable interference filter on its surface, and a third imager module has a bandbase filter attached to the imager. Video data from the three sensor modules is digitized and recorded in real time. Further, such video data is monitored by a computer and used to control the shutter exposure of each of the three sensor imager modules. Wavelength spectral image data and directional spectral image data are acquired by a single pass over a target area. Post-processing of such data produces reconstructed track-recovery-images extracted from a sequence of video frames for the spectral regions of interest at a fixed column position to produce multiple bands of monochrome images.
