When you choose quality fruit and vegetables, you rely on their appearance and on your experience. Imagine how much easier and accurate this process would be if there were a small camera-like device that could quantitatively measure the quality of the fresh produce. Researchers from Japan made a substantial step towards making such a device a reality. Talking in optical terms, the quality of agricultural products is encoded in their reflection spectra, in particular in the visible and near-infrared ranges. These spectra can be well measured in a laboratory using typically large and expensive equipment. It would be beneficial to be able to do this using relatively cheap and light hand-held devices. In this work, the authors suggest using an array of photonic-crystal-like patches on top of a commercially available CCD sensor to perform the required measurements. They have demonstrated that the information obtained from a CCD through specially designed distributed passband filters can be processed and the spectrum can be recovered with good accuracy. The proposed structure and data processing methods can be further used in various other applications that require multi-spectral imaging.     

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