  Hyper-spectral imaging has recently gained increasing attention for use in
different applications, including agricultural investigation, ground tracking,
remote sensing and many other. However, the high cost, large physical size and
complicated operation process stop hyperspectral cameras from being employed
for various applications and research fields. In this paper, we introduce a
cost-efficient, compact and easy to use active illumination camera that may
benefit many applications. We developed a fully functional prototype of such
camera. With the hope of helping with agricultural research, we tested our
camera for plant root imaging. In addition, a U-Net model for spectral
reconstruction was trained by using a reference hyperspectral camera's data as
ground truth and our camera's data as input. We demonstrated our camera's
ability to obtain additional information over a typical RGB camera. In
addition, the ability to reconstruct hyperspectral data from multi-spectral
input makes our device compatible to models and algorithms developed for
hyperspectral applications with no modifications required.
