This review paper reports near-infrared (NIR) imaging studies using a newly-developed NIR camera, Compovision. Compovision can measure a significantly wide area of 150 mmX 250 mm at high speed of between 2 and 5 s. It enables a wide spectral region measurement in the 1,000-2,350 nm range at 6 nm intervals. We investigated the potential of Compovision in the applications to industrial problems such as the evaluation of pharmaceutical tablets and polymers. Our studies have demonstrated that NIR imaging based on Compovision can solve several issues such as long acquisition times and relatively low sensitivity of detection. NIR imaging with Compovision is strongly expected to be applied not only to pharmaceutical tablet monitoring and polymer characterization but also to various applications such as those to food products, biomedical substances and organic and inorganic materials.
