Abstract
Traditional spectral unmixing involves intense signal processing applied on multispectral or hyperspectral data captured from an imaging device, which is highly time-consuming. In this article, a novel method, namely "optical unmixing", is proposed to alleviate the post processing effort by replacing the heavy computation with a spectrally tunable light source. By choosing spectral features of the light source intelligently, the abundance map of each material can be retrieved with minimum computation from gray value images captured by a normal camera. For n unknown endmembers, 3n + 1 measurements are required to retrieve the abundance maps with proposed algorithms.