Single-Fiber Based Endoscopic Imaging: Methods and Characteristics

Different from imaging an object through a multimode optical fiber (MMF) directly, it is much more challenging to use a single MMF for practical endoscopic imaging in which the light wave has been distorted twice: on the way in for the illumination and on the way out for the detection. In this paper, based on obtaining the optical transmission matrix (TM) of the MMF working in the reflective mode, we demonstrate that, via the measured optical TM, the object can be reconstructed directly from its round-trip distorted output speckle fields. Compared with other single-fiber based endoscopic imaging methods, our method doesn’t involve any scanning operation during the imaging process. Such an efficient method might have potential applications for wide-field and ultrathin fiber endoscopic imaging