Provided is a system and method for active multispectral imaging having a transmitter that uses narrowband optical radiation to dynamically illuminate an object with modulated structured light in multiple spectral bands, and a receiver that includes an independent panchromatic imager. The transmitter and receiver can be operated in a bistatic decoupled configuration to enable passive multispectral synthesis, illumination-invariant sensing, optical communications, and the ability for the transmitter to emit a sequence of spectral bands in an order that is unknown to the receiver, and the receiver is able to passively decode the spectral identity from a band identifier embedded in the modulated structured light. The receiver passively decodes embedded high-bandwidth simplex communications while reconstructing calibrated multispectral images at video frame rates.