This paper reports on a new property of grating, namely spectral combination, and on bi-grating diffraction imaging that is based on spectral combination. The spectral combination characteristic of a grating is the capability of combining multiple light beams of different wavelengths incident from specific angles into a single beam. The bi-grating diffraction imaging is the formation of the image of an object with two gratings: the first grating disperses the multi-color light beams from the object and the second combines the dispersed light beams to form the image. We gave the conditions necessary for obtaining the spectral combination. We also presented the equations that relate the two gratings’ spatial frequencies, diffraction orders and positions necessary for obtaining the bi-grating diffraction imaging.
