An imaging system and methods for resolving elements of interest through and obscuring environment by removing undesired signals from the intervening, obscuring environment is disclosed. A passive hyperspectral imaging sensor is calibrated and integrated into a system having a positioning and attitude detection system and an instrument control and data acquisition system that records data from sensors in a three-dimensional data cube having two spatial dimensions and a spectral dimension. Either an active detection and ranging system or a look-up-table approach or both are used to remove the noise generated by the intervening, obscuring environment from the data relevant to the elements of interest.