  Many materials have distinct spectral profiles. This facilitates estimation
of the material composition of a scene at each pixel by first acquiring its
hyperspectral image, and subsequently filtering it using a bank of spectral
profiles. This process is inherently wasteful since only a set of linear
projections of the acquired measurements contribute to the classification task.
We propose a novel programmable camera that is capable of producing images of a
scene with an arbitrary spectral filter. We use this camera to optically
implement the spectral filtering of the scene's hyperspectral image with the
bank of spectral profiles needed to perform per-pixel material classification.
This provides gains both in terms of acquisition speed --- since only the
relevant measurements are acquired --- and in signal-to-noise ratio --- since
we invariably avoid narrowband filters that are light inefficient. Given
training data, we use a range of classical and modern techniques including SVMs
and neural networks to identify the bank of spectral profiles that facilitate
material classification. We verify the method in simulations on standard
datasets as well as real data using a lab prototype of the camera.
