title: A review of snapshot multidimensional optical imaging: measuring photon tags in parallel.
abstract: Multidimensional optical imaging has seen remarkable growth in the past decade. Rather than measuring only the two-dimensional spatial distribution of light, as in conventional photography, multidimensional optical imaging captures light in up to nine dimensions, providing unprecedented information about incident photons' spatial coordinates, emittance angles, wavelength, time, and polarization. Multidimensional optical imaging can be accomplished either by scanning or parallel acquisition. Compared with scanning-based imagers, parallel acquisition-also dubbed snapshot imaging-has a prominent advantage in maximizing optical throughput, particularly when measuring a datacube of high dimensions. Here, we first categorize snapshot multidimensional imagers based on their acquisition and image reconstruction strategies, then highlight the snapshot advantage in the context of optical throughput, and finally we discuss their state-of-the-art implementations and applications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 306 N. Wright St., Urbana, Illinois 61801; Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Optical imaging laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Dr., MO, 63130.
authors.forename: Lihong V
authors.initials: LV
authors.lastname: Wang