Infrared hyperspectral imagers (HSI) have been fielded for the detection of hazardous chemical and biological compounds, tag detection (friend versus foe detection) and other defense critical sensing missions over the last two decades. Low Size/Weight/Power/Cost (SWaPc) methods of identification of chemical compounds spectroscopy has been a long term goal for hand held applications. We describe a new HSI concept for low cost / high performance InGaAs SWIR camera chemical identification for military, security, industrial and commercial end user applications.Multivariate Optical Elements (MOEs) are thin-film devices that encode a broadband, spectroscopic pattern allowing a simple broadband detector to generate a highly sensitive and specific detection for a target analyte. MOEs can be matched 1:1 to a discrete analyte or class prediction. Additionally, MOE filter sets are capable of sensing an orthogonal projection of the original sparse spectroscopic space enabling a small set of MOEs to discriminate a multitude of target analytes.This paper identifies algorithms and broadband optical filter designs that have been demonstrated to identify chemical compounds using high performance InGaAs VGA detectors. It shows how some of the initial models have been reduced to simple spectral designs and tested to produce positive identification of such chemicals. We also are developing pixilated MOE compressed detection sensors for the detection of a multitude of chemical targets in challenging backgrounds/environments for both commercial and defense/security applications. This MOE based, real-time HSI sensor will exhibit superior sensitivity and specificity as compared to currently fielded HSI systems.